Possibilities
by RapiDe
Summary: Ever wondered what they got up to before they were famous? An Operation: Falling S.T.A.R.S. Prequel.
1. Chapter 1

Legal disclaimers: Resident Evil and everything directly associated with it is owned by Capcom, I lay no claim to any of it and am only borrowing elements for the purposes of writing a fictional story set in the world of RE. Therefore please don't sue me, anyone, its all just a bit of fun, honest. The only things which are mine are original characters and concepts created for this story.

Disclaimers: This is a prequel story focusing on Xenia Omorova, the character who appears in Matt6's "Operation: Falling S.T.A.R.S.", covering how she came to work for Umbrella. Again, credit to Mat6 and SportyGirl for giving me the idea to do these back-story fics. This symbol / denotes thoughts or something important when surrounding a word or words, while a Y indicates a page break. Finally, my knowledge of firearms is extremely limited, so apologies for that. All Reviews welcomed.

SPECIAL NOTES: Anna Neagley is also a character created and owned by me, ask first if you want to borrow any of these. Ian William's, Matthew Ryan, Mark Klein, Paul Williams and Thomas Walker all belong to Matt6. Others will be accounted for as necessary as the story progresses.

Faith

**Chapter One**

/January 3rd 2001, northern Afghanistan/

Night, in the winter of Afghanistan, was a cold, dark, terrifying thing. It created shadows in huge mountain crags that could conceal any number of threats. It made a ragged ground seem even more dangerous than it was, with jagged stone edges, loose stones, deep sinkholes and rivers that could literally chill a man to the bone in minutes gleaming like the silver edges of razor-bladed knives in the dull, deadly darkness. The moon barely even lit the sky beneath dark clouds that drifted on the slight wind so slowly a man could almost have run faster, making the eyes hurt as one tried to compensate for the constant shifting shades of dull light and deep darkness.

Matthew Ryan, better known as "Matt" to his friends, stood on a slowly shifting ground formed of scree and small stones which tried to roll away every time he moved, looked ahead of himself and sighed. There was Marine Firebase Echo, a collection of cement block structures, tents and metal-wall warehouses all recently constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. They'd been put up to house the troops stationed in this area since existing sites had all been deemed security risks, insufficient or simply not worth even the inspection, since most were at best half-wrecked and dilapidated twenty-odd year old former Red Army bases.

Around the perimeter barbed wire had been strung across the tops of wire fences reinforced with steel bars and spikes atop the steel, while on the inside several guard towers with searchlights which were constantly roving contained Snipers and heavy machine guns. Guards with dogs performed regular and irregular patrols all across the grounds on a variety of routes while, unquestionably, more men silently reconnoitred the hills and mountains all about just in case. No one was safe anywhere in Afghanistan, the people they were fighting would blow themselves up just for a chance to kill a single American in the middle of a crowd of people so extraordinary precautions were the norm. That, in part, was why Matt and his team were at this lost place...

Twenty-eight years old, brown-haired and eyed with an easy smile and good looks, six feet odd tall and with a lean, muscular build that spoke of years of hard experience as opposed to hours in the gym, dressed in grey-black fatigues to match the territory, Matt looked at the place he and his command were going to be calling home for the foreseeable future and wondered just what "Punishment Detail" really meant. Sure, they were part of the Special Operations Command, the SOC, an elite Black Ops military unit for the CIA. Sure, their purpose here was to hunt down and deal with any potential Weapons of Mass Destruction as well as any Al'Quaeda commanders in the area. Sure, they had very specific Orders regarding where and when and what...

But, would Ian have sent them up here if he hadn't been ordered to? They had no solid Intel on any major hostile activity in or near the area, only suspicions and possibilities. One did not deploy the elite on the basis of possibility, which meant that someone in the Pentagon had likely exchanged words with someone at Langley behind closed doors. The SOC was no more immune to Political pressures than any other Military unit or organisation, although Ian Williams, SOC Director, would fight all the way to the bitter end to prevent his people from being hit by such stupidity. Did that mean they wouldn't be, though? No. Matt smelled trouble in the wind, someone was out to drop the SOC in it if they could... He glanced either side of him, shooting a smirk at his team.

On his left was Mark Klein, an inch or so taller than him, similar weight and build with short brown hair and blue eyes making him an average man in appearance, dressed headed to foot in mountain camouflage fatigues just like Matt. Two years younger than Matt, his eyes were shadowed with memories of loss and pain which broke through quickly if he became too emotional or involved. With his brother possibly dead in the Racoon City catastrophe, his sister-in-law MIA after barely surviving and escaping the same herself, supposedly now running with the rogue S.T.A.R.S. who had apparently caused the disaster. Added to all of the rumours and half-grasped intelligence floating around Military and Intelligence circles concerning the truth of the disaster...

Matt often wondered just how many people in the world could or would have just absorbed those kinds of hits and just said "Okay". Mark, for his part, was not one of them. Still a perfectly capable soldier, he nonetheless no longer discussed his personal life except with the SOC Psychologist and it was suspected he'd received therapy. Nobody blamed him or thought any less of him for being human.

On Matt's right was Paul Edwards, two inches shorter than Matt at just under six feet tall. Less physical than either Matt or Mark, he nonetheless had a solidly muscular body and grace of movement which easily compensated for any lesser physical power. With dark brown hair and grey eyes which shone with intelligence, his soft face bore an almost permanent smile which made everyone feel a little better, as did the bad jokes he had a habit of telling, deliberately. His camouflage fatigues hung a little loose on his frame, but it was a running joke in Team One that it was because he moved so fast that he'd stretched the materials in all kinds of strange ways.

A man with an exceptional mind and a soldier who was considered more than capable, he was also dealing with pain that he hid better than Mark. His brother had died in the Racoon City disaster, even worse he was confirmed dead in the nuclear plant meltdown that had simply wiped the city off the maps. Paul didn't let it bother him, let himself be absorbed by his job and his studies while he dealt with a chill inside that would never, ever go away as best he could.

Matt nodded towards the camp and made a move-on gesture with his hand before doing so himself. They'd been dropped off by stealth chopper a mile away ten minutes ago, kit bags slung over shoulders with weapons immediately to hand, now they were almost there. Matt had been tempted to suggest they test security by scaling the fences and infiltrating the Barracks just to see if it could be done, but then he'd seen the faces of the guards and sensed the nerves of the soldiers who, temporarily, lived here. Anything unexpected would end up with people dead in a place like this, more than likely several, including him and his team, Team One. That meant the front door-or gate, in this case.

He lit a green flare as they jogged in, followed by Paul and Mark, to show their presence and point of arrival, as instructed for Covert troops. He sensed rather than heard the approach of armed soldiers, until he made out indistinct shapes in the night and stopped. He pulled out his Dog Tags for inspection and confirmation of his identity, when added to a visual map of his face on computer screens and fingerprints-all of which would be wiped from the records the moment confirmed. Mark and Paul followed suit, only minutes later a man with a senior officers insignia confirmed it all with a quiet word to each of them before he flashed a double burst of light from his torch at the camp, followed by a single long one.

With that, Matt and his team moved forwards at a jog to the camp, moved through the opened gates which were immediately closed behind them and headed for the assigned segment of the camp that held the SOC barracks. Including Thomas Walker, the senior SOC officer in Afghanistan at the moment, there were nine teams already operating in the country at various locations-two of them from here, which meant they were due a reunion after a long while apart...

Y

Not far away, sitting quietly in a chair outside the main recreation area for the base while better than 90 of the rest of the troops who didn't have early-morning duties, as well as some who did, cheered and drank themselves stupid at the events occurring inside, Anna Neagley glanced up at the stars in the sky, tried and failed to count them as the clouds drifted across everything, then looked back at her right hand. She was holding a HALO combat knife by the tip of the blade between the ends of two fingers, but the slightest movement shifted the blade to her middle fingertip with perfect balance. That done, she started rolling the knife over and around her fingers and thumb, only the blade touching skin as it moved, silver moonlight shining bright between the seconds.

During the day, she'd have practised with throwing knives or in the gym with any number of different routines and styles, unarmed and Close Quarter Combat/CQC styles. Now everything was shut down and it was too dark, deliberately, to see the target board she used, so she was reduced to passing the time by practising a skill so simple she could have done it in her sleep. Running or heavy physical workouts just weren't an option, not here, the latest newspaper was a week old, she'd read all of the books she liked she could get... More to the point, she'd be dead before she'd socialise with a group of drunken idiots. She had enough nightmares and bad memories for another /two/ lifetimes, thank you...

Twenty-eight years old, five-eight tall, leanly muscular and almost sculpted in her flawless physical development, Anna Neagley was the kind of woman and soldier everyone who saw her thought about, in a variety of ways, every night afterwards for years. Her skin and hair were deepest, darkest and purest black, her hair falling loose halfway down her back in a wave of silk, while hard chocolate-brown eyes were touched by a cold edge that put off anyone who thought to look before they leapt. With a physique that was simply fantasy and looks that improved on it, remarkable bone structure and hard muscle made her seem more dream than reality to most soldiers. None of them had been granted the chance to find out, in any case, since she didn't socialise and trying to push the issue was genuinely dangerous.

As a native of Ethiopia originally, with her Negroid appearance and lush looks she was exceptional in the army in any event. She was even more unique for several other reasons, but only she and an old man who lived in Chicago in the USA knew all of them, a very select few knowing selected one's. As she reclined in her jet-black fatigues, absently spinning the knife around and about in her hand so fast it dazzled the eye, she just lay back and tried to think of what the new day would bring...

She nearly leapt out of her chair when she saw the flares just outside the camp, she /did/ when she saw the torchlight flash. She'd done more than her share of Covert and Intelligence work, for Special Forces and others, she knew exactly what she was looking at. She just didn't know /who/.

She loped to the edge of the recreation main hall before, seeing nothing, sprinting at a distance eating long-legged run across open ground at a speed people had been known to simply stop and stare at. She made it to an area next to a barracks with a clear view of the gate before the gates swung closed and, with a hidden smirk, got a good look at the new arrivals. Strictly speaking, as well as officially speaking, she shouldn't have been doing this. Realistically speaking, if you played by the rules all of the time you'd be dead. Initiative and imagination, no mater what you were taught in Boot Camp, played a massive part in making a real soldier a truly effective one. She could use a little heads-up advantage…

She had to blink several times on seeing just who it was, then thought that actually breathing might just be a healthy act. _Him…?_

"Matt…?

Y

Xenia Omerova had never been one to turn down an invitation to a good party. At this one, her only condition had been they stock authentic home-brewed Russian Vodka, since that was the only real drink she'd accept in quantity. So far, they'd been true to their word. So far, they hadn't regretted it.

Thirty-six years old, six foot tall with dark auburn fiery hair and deep mahogany-brown eyes, all full curves and firm power in a slim, lean and strong body designed for high-speed Sin and excess in all its forms, Xenia was a woman with striking dark, gypsy looks that made her almost hauntingly beautiful. In a tight black vest, trousers and leather boots with her hair down and loose about her shoulders, falling easily to her waist, she was sheer unbridled sensuality in figure and form even as she tossed back yet another shot of pure Vodka with a smile that spoke of dark pleasures to come. Her cleavage was evident, long fingers on graceful hands suggested all kinds of images and ideas, long legs suggested very specific ones, her muscle suggested ideas that made men weep. She /was/ temptation, there was little more to it, not least because /no-one/ chose /her/...

Over a hundred men and some women, all cheering, sat around wooden tables pressed together in the centre of a room barely tall enough for Xenia to stand up straight in atop the tables. Chairs had been shoved away wherever, the only other thing in sight on the wood and metal floor was a half-empty bottle of pure Vodka and the glass Xenia was using. Bright electric lights lit up the room and made every shadow disappear, partially as a security precaution, but that it helped illuminate the movement of Xenia's body under her clothes even as sweat ran down her skin everywhere from the rooms heating only helped those watching imagine even more.

As she danced slowly on the tables, firm body and fine features holding the attention like a vice, Xenia knew that even the women would have done anything at all that she asked to see just a little bit more of her. It was the kind of power you developed over someone when you got behind their eyes and into their mind, when you shut out everything else and simply made them beg for you to do just that /_bit_/ more. It was raw lust and temptation as a weapon, one she knew how to use. These idiots would have done /anything/ she'd asked of them right now. How the American's had conquered the world when a single former KGB agent could hold spellbound so many for over an hour she'd never know.

If it wasn't so funny, it would have been sad... Even more entertaining was the fact that the American's actually thought a single bottle of Vodka was enough to get her drunk, to do some kind of "Striptease" as they called such acts. Obviously, none of them had ever seriously tried to push their limits just to find out if they could go any further, any faster, any deeper. None of them knew that, to do this properly, you had to get ready first, which meant that there /were/ no limits...

Xenia gyrated slowly, from standing to almost sitting, throwing her head back then almost going down on hands and knees, her long hair falling loose and rough about her head and shoulders. Her sweat made her hair stick to her shoulders, breasts, neck and face in a way which, she knew, only suggested trailing fingers and breathy, stolen touches all the more. Her grin was feral, her eyes smouldered as she rose to her feet slowly, hands out and almost forming claws, even as she slowly swung around as she stood to take in the whole room. Her muscles bunched, she front-flipped to a one-handed handstand even before she threw back all of the remaining Vodka in her glass in one sharp swallow. Flipping back to her feet, she swiped the back of her hand across her lips and blew a kiss to the highest ranking man in the room, a Brigadier-who looked very uncomfortable suddenly-then grabbed the entire bottle of Vodka, winked, and put it to her mouth.

Cheers nearly took the roof off, along with a few catcalls and suggestions as to things she could do next. They all trailed off into an astonished silence as she drank, and drank, and drank...the last drop seemed to take forever to fall to her lips. She licked her lips, swallowed, then rolled the bottle over in her hand to neck down and shook it, not a drip falling free. The cheers came back with an incredible roar of sound that almost physically moved her on the table, but she stood her ground and raised her hand, gesturing towards a specific individual. The individual was a striking female blonde from the Signals Corp, one of the most attractive women in the room, a fact that by itself caused eyebrows to shoot up. The fact that she quickly stood and started walking towards Xenia raised more.

The woman's name, Xenia knew, was Sally Jenkins, a Private in her mid-twenties who was halfway convinced she'd have to sleep her way to the top. Xenia had been trying to derail that train of thought for months now, so she'd come up with a new strategy that she thought might work. She just hoped that the blonde had enough sense to play along and not even try to make something out of nothing...

Xenia tossed clear the bottle and glass, both of which hit the floor with a dull thump and rolled clear of the tables altogether. She stepped to the edge and held out a hand, which Sally took, stepped back and almost pulled Sally up behind her, then led her to the centre of the tables. That done, she turned to face the other woman and put her hands on her hips, her most inviting smile on her face. Sally almost had a heart attack before she worked it out, but only Xenia saw her face. After that, a wicked smile graced her face, lighting up striking features.

Good, she'd gotten the idea...

Y

None of the other SOC teams were about, even Thomas Walker wasn't to be found, so Matt, Mark and Paul found their billets, slung their packs, secured their gear and considered what to do next. Socialising wasn't such a bad idea, they decided, even though they couldn't let slip, ever, just who they were and what they were doing here. If there was a party on, though, as there seemed to be, it was far less likely that any new arrivals would be particularly odd, let alone noted, since everyone would likely be a little drunk, happy and distracted at the very least.

With smirks all around, despite their tiredness they unanimously decided on a bit of R&R before getting down to business the next dawn. After all, all of them could go at least two days without sleep if they had to, that was practically a part of the job description. Switching to regular fatigues, black t-shirt, trousers and black boots, they were in and out inside ten minutes. Not one of them so much as suspected that they'd acquired a curious almost-invisible stalker...

Y

The "dance" moves Xenia and Sally were using would have made most swallow their tongues, more would have been left drooling and incapable, the few remaining would have just stared. No-one was surprised that the sultry Xenia knew her way around a woman's body as well as a man's, but very few would have imagined that the seemingly reserved Sally had a wild side like /this/.

Xenia knew, but that was a secret she'd kept very specifically. When honestly drunk Sally talked a lot/too/ much, but she got /that/ drunk so rarely that you could mark separate Calendars by it. Xenia had a solid rock constitution and she drank like a drowning fish with anything but Vodka, which would get to her eventually, so Sally attempting to prove herself by drinking the older Russian woman under the table had been a severe error of judgement. It had also left her as one of the few women Xenia actually /liked, strangely enough. To her, if you had the guts to do something you either did it or were afraid of it, not a fault Sally had. Besides which, her language was magnificently foul and her opinions on the US Military and several of her male colleagues were hysterically funny when she let her guard down. She was amazingly good company once you really got to know her, Xenia had discovered...

Hands and fingers wandered everywhere, legs intertwined, bodies touched and pressed against one another, fingertips traced smooth skin and slipped under tight clothes. Teeth nipped at throats and breasts, lips trailed over cheeks, shoulders and skin all over. Caresses and touches turned into embraces, hands and fingers ran through hair, both women almost went limp in one another's arms as hands and delicate fingers trailed over throat, chest and stomach to just above the belt. Both found a way to kneel and caress the others hard-muscled legs, to lick the sweat from the others belly... Both women pretended not to hear the heavy silence that was spreading across the room, the occasional thud as someone just dropped a glass or bottle or mug, or just fell over. They pretended not to notice the stares of everyone in the room burning holes in their clothes...

With a final devilish smirk, Xenia span Sally around to face her, took her in as tight an embrace as she could-then winked and passionately kissed Sally full on the lips. Sally almost collapsed in shock, but rallied magnificently and responded fast, tongue probing at Xenia's lips. Xenia let her in with a twinkle in her eyes, enjoyed the kiss-better than almost any man she'd ever tried-then forced away the sensation of pleasure even as she slowly pulled back. Sally's breathing was fast, _too_ fast, she was flushing red all over, but she managed to step back as well. She'd enjoyed that /_too_/ much, she needed a man to remind her of what she'd be missing/now/. But who...? Ah, yes, that would work.

Moving away from Sally altogether Xenia gathered herself and, even as the cheers and wolf-whistles appeared to blast open the main entrance, rising in volume and power by the second, she aimed herself at the door. Then she began to run, before rolling, flipping and diving over and over in an exceptional Olympic-class display of gymnastic agility, speed, grace and power...

Y

Matt heard the noise inside the recreation centre long before he got there, even as it was rising in volume. Wondering just what was going on to cause such a wild party on a Military base-more to the point, who was running it that they could get away with doing so?-he walked forwards ahead of Mark and Paul to push the door open. As he did the heat, light and noise left him nearly blind, deaf and dumb-before someone landed literally right in front of him, his arms automatically rising to support an individual he presumed was staggering out. That was mere seconds before he felt the curves and lines of a woman pressing hard into him...

The brief look he got at exquisite good looks, wild eyes and loose hair which practically slapped him, the scent of her breath told him he was in trouble. Drenched in alcohol, yes, but what he could see alone made it clear she wasn't drunk. That was precisely one second before the feral vision in front of him grabbed his head in both hands and stuck her tongue down his throat so fast he almost fell over. The kiss was so luxuriously perfect he very nearly wished he wasn't dressed, Melissa, his fiancé's, memory only just holding on in his minds eye. That was before the tall woman kissing him pulled back sharply, looking far more shaken than he would have expected from so brief a contact even as heat spread throughout him in an inferno conflagration from the kiss, his lips still tingling seconds later... Then he felt a knife at his throat.

"Hi, I have a knife, I like killing people and I'm completely out of my mind..." whispered another woman's honey-sweet soft voice in his ear. That voice alone could have made the dead sit up and listen, but it seemed oddly familiar... Then he was forcefully spun around to meet the owner. His eyes almost fell out in simple shock. "Hi again, Matthew" said Anna Neagley, then she kissed him even more passionately than the first woman had.

He almost died, wasn't even sure he was standing up by the time she let him go too. He slowly registered the dead silence in the room-Anna kissed NO ONE, let alone touched them like she had him, he would quickly discover-looked around carefully, in case he fainted, and spotted his CO, Thomas Walker, near the front of the room, angry and showing it. /_Oh, boy_/ was all that ran through his mind at the sight...

He would never forget that was how he first met Xenia Omerova.

/End of Chapter One. All Reviews welcomed./


	2. Chapter 2

For all disclaimers: See Chapter One.

Faith

Chapter Two 

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

When she woke up in the morning Xenia had to shake her head a few times before the fuzzy feeling which let her know just how much she'd had to drink the previous night went away. She was housed in the officer's quarters as an independent operator, granted Command rank to allow her to operate as part of the Military presence in Afghanistan, even though it was mainly American and she was Russian.

Some senior officers and ranks had asked what her purpose was, but "Why?" was actually very simple. There was a noticeable lack of people who had field experience in Afghanistan amongst the US Military, whereas she'd done time in the country in 89' with the Spetsnaz hunting down Mujahideen Guerrillas before the Red Army had finally pulled out. The CIA had people who knew this place, but they weren't going to discuss it with the Military any more than she was going to have a conversation with the President about the training exercises of the US Pacific fleet.

More to the point, with the continuing Terrorist threat from Al'Quaeda against American particularly and allied threats across the world, the CIA had a different agenda to the Military and she knew what it was. "Find OBL, cut his head off, pack it in a box of dry ice, bring it home and put it on the Presidents desk" was a standing order with the CIA these days. The world of espionage was really too small and incestuous to keep anything secret that wasn't really secret these days, unless extreme measures were taken. Not helped by a bad habit of most Agencies, that of keeping a vast amount of information on computers which could be Hacked...

The room she had was small, a bed barely enough for her height, a table, a sink, a lamp, a window covered by a thin grey curtain and a strongbox at the base of the bed to keep personal items in. Items she wanted truly secure could be held in the camps HQ building safe, which was permanently watched by armed guards with orders to shoot to kill, but she never carried anything /that/ personal around with her. All that went in the strongbox was clothes, gear, a spare set of Dog Tags and her Diary. She wrote the Diary entirely in Cyrillic, which made it pretty certain that no one would understand anything in it without time to study to her mind. Languages just weren't a strong point of most Military set-ups.

She breathed in deeply, sniffed the air-the smell of smoke, oil, burnt metal, exhaust fumes, the rotten stench of unwashed bodies, a suggestion of latrine stink-sighed, rolled back the covers and rose to bare feet on the wooden plank floor. A glance at the dim light told her everything she needed to know, added to a glance at her watch-0500, roughly an hour before daybreak proper. She'd just have time to get in her regular morning workout, as usual, before getting properly dressed and ready to move. The American's called it "Time to rock and roll!" with exclamations of glee when they got going, an expression she didn't understand but got the gist of. All mad, she sometimes thought. They didn't live in the Wild West any more but no one seemed to have mentioned that to them...

She slipped a pair of brown shorts and a worn black T-shirt over her jet-black bra and pants, pulled on a pair of well-worn grey trainers, slipped a towel over her shoulder while grabbing her wash bag and slipped outside, silent as a ghost. She passed no one on her way out, but got outside, in the dull, cold early-morning mist touched by the dull hints of dawn, to find the one person who always beat her there already present.

Anna Neagley, Delta Force madwoman and resident hardest bitch in camp, or so the men claimed. That the woman was as tough, resilient, skilled and professional as they came Xenia didn't doubt for a second. That the woman was also likely actually crazy was something else she had little doubt about.

She'd been doing the dirty work of a hundred different employers on three continents since she went independent when the KGB folded in 91'. She'd slaughtered, burnt, ruined and broken her way through everything and everyone in her path for nigh-on a decade. She'd do anything for enough money, even work for the idiot scumbags-most at least-she used to hate from the USA. She'd have thrown an innocent man off a cliff and watched him fall with a smile just to get information from a reluctant prisoner, then never have any trouble sleeping afterwards...

She wasn't sure Anna Neagley slept at all, doubted she dreamt of anything good, ever, genuinely believed that the woman would commit mass murder just to remove a possible threat and never, ever wanted to get on her bad side. She'd seen Anna gut a man then light his insides with lighter fuel and a match just to make a point while he was still alive. She could still hear his screams, hideous howls of awful pain and agony... Nobody completely sane was capable of acts like that. Xenia knew that for a fact, because she'd do just about anything to get the job done and there was /_nothing_/ that would make her go that far. She was, herself, quite possibly a sociopath, yes...but that just made Anna probably insane.

"Morning, Xenia" said Anna, dressed much the same way Xenia was in the early dawn. Of course, the woman was practising her Tai'Chi with the same almost mystical skill she seemed to display in any combat situation Xenia had ever witnessed. The more desperate, the more dangerous, the more calmly she fought, the more focused she got. If it wasn't for an almost Psychotic short temper that Anna kept tightly leashed, for over ninety percent of the time at least, she'd have been cited as the model soldier. As it was, she was regarded as the go-to Agent for anyone who wanted very particular jobs done where possible fallout wasn't an issue. She'd never failed at any of these jobs, not once.

"Morning, Anna" replied Xenia, dropping her gear to one side before limbering up, stretching her limbs, flexing her joints and muscles. She was definitely starting to creak a bit, she silently noticed, the years were starting to catch up with her... Forcing unwelcome thoughts from her mind, she mimicked Anna's posture before following through using her own Crane style to work out the kinks and residual cramps from the hard beds. It took her half an hour, then she and Anna moved together to the gym, when they went for a more traditional workout using a variety of exercise gear such as Rings, Beams and Frames. Half an hour later, done and covered in sweat, they shared a drink from Anna's big water flask, although Xenia made certain not to touch the dangerous woman even in passing. There were...consequences for anything involving physical contact and Anna. _Crazy..._

She was a connoisseur of the male body, she'd had more than enough to take a single look at any man and see just what he or they had to offer without even a smile. Nine times out of ten she'd be disappointed, very rarely she'd be satisfied. Even more rarely, she'd be left truly sated. Come to think of it, despite everything her two current lovers had tried, despite the fact both men had the bodies of Gods, she hadn't been happy about much in that respect for a long time. The two of them thought they were Adonis, but she'd seen the best and they just weren't it. Ha, if Anna Neagley had been a man she knew without question what would have happened by now. Sometimes, it was almost a shame she didn't date women...

Anna led the way into the showers, pulling off her t-shirt and shorts and casually dumping them on the ground on the way. She wasn't wearing anything under the t-shirt, but her pants slipped to the ground as the doors shut behind her, the showers starting up seconds later. Xenia followed suit in a more orderly style and the small shower room was quickly filled with steam, both women luxuriating in their brief time under hot, clean water... All too brief, as it happened, since they had to prep for the day's mission, briefing for which started at 0700.

Also, as Xenia was well aware, because Anna was getting increasingly annoyed at the SOC Commanding Officer Thomas Walker, who was refusing to take seriously warnings to stay away from the stunning woman. He'd decided that she was his Camp Whore, it seemed, despite his Wife and child back in the USA, despite the fact he knew Anna knew about them, and wasn't going to take "No" for an answer. Xenia-although she couldn't help but appreciate his taste with stolen glances herself, taking in lush lines and firm, defined curves-personally hoped Walker was up to date on his Health Insurance in the USA. If she knew Anna, and she did, once they both got back there Anna was going to hunt him down and put him in a Wheelchair if he didn't stop his stupidity here...

Of course, Anna now clearly had her own eye on someone else entirely-someone she appeared to have met before. Who he was she didn't know, but she'd find out. She hadn't forgotten the spark between them when she'd kissed him so unexpectedly, it was rare that she hit it off with /anyone/ just "like that". Maybe she should get to know the man better herself...

As they dressed again on their way out, Anna raised an eyebrow at Xenia as she got a good look at the front of Xenia's t-shirt. "Nice shirt" she said, a laugh barely hidden behind her self-control, before she swept her loose hair behind her back and strode out into the gym, Xenia shaking her head. Xenia's t-shirt read:

You're only jealous because the voices are talking to me 

It would be typical of Anna to find that funny, especially since the t-shirt was one Xenia had picked up in America about a year ago. She'd thought it oddly appropriate for a Mercenary, somehow. In the gym, the few early risers who rose early enough to see them leave were up-Xenia nodded with a smile at Sally Jenkins, who was already halfway through her gymnastics workout routine, to an almost shy smile in return-but Anna only had eyes for one person. Xenia followed her gaze and almost smirked.

_Him_. Who else would it be?

Y

Matt saw the distinctive tall woman from last night-he doubted he'd ever forget her after an introduction like /_that_/-about a second after he saw Anna. A moment after he saw them, he realised that both of them were damp, not with perspiration, hair slicked against clothes and skin, clothes tight and pressing against firm, full bodies... He almost fell off the exercise beam he was using when he realised that they were both staring at him, he nearly had a heart attack when they both started walking towards him. He quickly shifted stance and landed firmly on his feet, almost at attention, trying to ignore the fact that, with increasing speed, every eye and ear in the room was being turned towards him.

He smiled slightly at the taller woman's t-shirt, appreciating the saying, before it registered that, obviously, Anna wasn't wearing anything underneath her own damp t-shirt. It took /no/ effort to remember that one, incredible night when that incredible body, that remarkable woman and he had gyrated together, sweat-slick bodies pressed against one another in almost feral heat /hard/ as the rough sheets of his student dorm bed barely covered them. He still had the scars, tiny white marks now, a bite in his shoulder, scratches down his back, sides and chest. Mind-blowing wasn't enough of an explanation, mind-numbing and body-breaking were closer. Nobody was /that/ good, but he had the proof...

"Good morning, lover" said Anna, reaching out a hand and running her fingertips along his cheek. His heart rate doubled as he almost literally turned bright red. He abruptly wished that he was anywhere else on Earth. She'd been in the forces long before him, was a War Veteran who had seen action in the Gulf, Europe and other, less well known places, she'd seen sights, been places, done things he couldn't even imagine. She was a fantasy whose image and memory had followed him around for literally years-and it looked like she hadn't forgotten him, either. If he hadn't had to give her, rather urgently, the bad news that he had a Fiancée he loved very much back in the USA, who knew what could have happened...

"...Hi, Anna. Look, before anything else I really need to tell you something-" he began, only to be cut off by Anna placing a single fingertip over his lips. She tasted just like he remembered, Beech tree and ocean breeze with a slight hint of salt, just like her under the surface. Except when you got under her skin, figuratively speaking of course, there was a lot more than a "trace" of salt to be had...

"Shush, Matt. Drop by my quarters later and tell me so we can catch up properly. Oh, by the way" said Anna, glancing over her shoulder and gesturing her companion forwards, "I think you've met our resident Russki killing machine, but lets do it formally this time. Matthew Ryan, meet Xenia Omerova. Xenia Omerova, meet Matthew Ryan. His friends call him Matt, I call him things you don't repeat in polite company unless you're drunk. Shake hands, compare notes then take him somewhere relatively private and ride him like a horse, Xenia, he's worth it. See you around, Matt" said Anna, before walking away with a wink.

Matt felt as though he was trapped in the fires of Hell he was so embarrassed by Anna's comments, every part of his body flaming red in embarrassment he was sure, even while wolf-whistles sounded from several of the women and men all around. Xenia smirked like the cat which had got the cream, then shook his hand with a broad smile.

"Pleased to meet you...Matt. Don't worry, I won't rip your trousers off and take you right here, it would be bad form to do that on only the second Date. Will you _stop_ trying to disappear into the floor, da? Believe me, Anna's just given you a serious compliment, she likes about ten people in this camp and I am one of them. When you're a Delta, let alone when its Anna, having a "friend" like you means something to the people here. Anyone would volunteer to work with that woman, believe me, you won't see better" said Xenia, a twinkle in her eye as she took in the silly American.

"Yeah, I know" muttered Matt, slowly, before he looked at Xenia inquisitively. "She mentioned your Russian, I caught the accent. There's a Russian contingent here?" he asked.

Xenia rolled her eyes. "Fucking CIA still hasn't learnt how to tell the truth, has it? Military Intelligence still too busy spying on the Europeans I suppose... Rooskaya, there is no Russian contingent, da? I have...experience in this country, am a Mercenary now and was hired to lead you to places the Spetsnaz found during the War. Weren't you briefed? Your military knows almost nothing of this place beyond aerial and satellite photos, what the Alliance against the Taleban to the north has told you and what ground they stand on. Ten thousand killers could hide in these mountains and slit all our throats at night before we know a thing. I am here to prevent that. You understand?" asked Xenia.

"Oh...yeah, sure, sorry. No ring, though?" asked Matt, noticing the lack of Russian Special Forces steel-grey signature ring on her hand.

"No, I worked _with_ the Spetsnaz, trained with them, not _for_ them. This is what you are looking for" said Xenia, raising her right hand to display a thick golden on her ring finger, a band with three thick vertical lines across the top half cutting right down to the skin. Matt frowned.

"I've never seen anything like that before. What does it represent?" he asked, curiously.

"Its Soviet Black Ops jewellery left over from the old days, Matt. Only Assassins out of the Red Room got to wear it. It isn't really supposed to come off... Does that tell you anything?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

His expression hardened. "Yes, your ex-KGB, meaning you were here in 89' on killing missions with the Spetsnaz given my best guess and your age. I hope that means you know your way around?" Matt asked, his voice cooler than a moment ago.

"I got pulled out in 89' when the Raven disappeared off the face of the planet-don't ask-and never went back, yes. Very good, Matt, I'm impressed. Which makes you intelligence-linked Special Forces, no one else in your position could have heard of something like that. Special Operations Command? Military Intelligence? Never mind, I'll find out, its what I do. Shall we, though? I think people are staring" said Xenia, with a gesture that took in a large number of people who suddenly had a ferocious need to get fit that had them working madly on anything to hand, even two at a time.

Matt stared around him and sighed, while Xenia just chuckled, turned and walked away…

Y

Thomas Walker, one of the most senior SOC officers in Afghanistan, was Matt's superior officer. Five-eight tall, just under twelve and a half stone heavy, most of it muscle, with blue hair and brown eyes set about a smoothly handsome face that some people said suggested things about his sexuality he didn't appreciate, he was thick-muscled and physically solid in form.

Thirty-seven years old and rapidly chasing down his thirty-eighth, he was getting too old to be in the field in front-line combat-just like Xenia knew she was herself-but was a highly-trained soldier with extensive Special Forces experience and an encyclopaedic knowledge of warfare and combat. Highly intelligent, he was also one of the smartest Special Forces senior rankers, which was a large part of what kept him in the field. Feral cunning, ferocity in combat, deft planning and the ruthlessness to do what it took were all things Special Forces troops tended to have as a matter of course. The brains to put it all together and make it work for several groups at once against a variety of targets and the precision of mind to know who to send to do what was unusual, a fact which had put him in command.

He liked the job, mainly because it gave him the opportunity to boss people around people suspected. The fact that he was so good at it in reality just meant that he could get away with irritating everyone in any case. Besides which, he'd made friends among everyone but the Delta Force teams so people didn't piss him off unless they wanted a late-night beating for disrespecting a "Friend of the pros" in a manner which would leave no evidence and no clues while teeth and blood were found everywhere.

Anna Neagley was the reason no one on Delta Force would give him the time of day. Hellcat and Harpy combined to make something much worse, a woman who was genuinely feared as much as admired for a raw talent for violence and combat that defied description and even imagination for most people, a uniquely efficient Special Forces soldier no one crossed who her men would follow beyond the grave on into Hell. To the Delta's Anna was their dark Goddess, the pinnacle of achievement that they all aimed for but never reached. To insult, let alone disrespect her or her talent, was a worse act than threatening to put two in the head of a loved one to every Delta who'd served with her.

Her squad was regarded as a terrifying pack of Psychotic savages literally willing and able to eat the enemy alive if necessary, while Anna strode through everything as though it simply didn't matter to her because she knew exactly what she was doing and did it the way it was supposed to be every time. Thomas Walker had heard of her reputation on his first day in Afghanistan, then met her, then made an unofficial promise to everyone who mattered that he was going to have that luscious black body writhing under him long before his Tour of Duty in Afghanistan was over. No one had been able to convince him yet that she really would actually kill him if he kept it up. Anna was actually crazy, it wasn't a secret, but that didn't seem to matter to Walker either. Bets were unofficially being taken on how long it would be before she crippled him at this rate...

"Alright, people, settle down...thank you. Now, as I'm sure you've noticed, we have some new arrivals today. I can't tell you exactly who they are or why they're here, so don't ask. Clear? Good" began Walker, glancing around the broad barracks room. Only senior officers or Special Forces officers had been invited to this briefing, which was off-limits to the ranks in no uncertain terms. That had put Matt and Anna, a ranking Delta Force officer, in the room not that far from each other. He could feel more than see the smile playing around her lips as she made a point of not looking at him.

Matt had known Tom Walker for months now and was, himself, still not sure what to make of the older man. Very competent, skilled and experienced, sure. A soldier who knew what he was doing and was very good at it, no question of that. But, as a man? Walker had done just about anything and everything he could do to stay out of the field in combat situations, despite a record that evidently stated he had no trouble at all leaping into the line of fire. People Matt had met who'd known Walker for years tended to tell you to watch your back around the man, while what little Matt had been able to ferret out from other SOC troops who'd served under him was that none of them really liked him.

The kind of man who was good around a gun and a desk but terrible with people and personnel issues? Well, he wouldn't be the first one. As long as he got the job done, the rest could be worked on.

"Those of you who've been here for a while know what were here to do and why, but let me state the facts again so that were clear for all here. Would anyone like to start me off?" continued Walker, glancing around the room. His eyes settled for too long on Anna, Matt couldn't help but notice. She utterly failed to react, at all. From the expression on Walkers face, that irked him no small amount.

The real problem was, was there anything else to the fact that Walker didn't make any real attempt to build bridges with other SOC soldiers and fellow servicemen in the branches of the armed forces he'd worked with? He made all of the professional links necessary, did what he had to do, then just never pressed on any further. Some pretty ugly rumours had surfaced when he'd started really trying to dig into Walkers past, before someone had gotten word to Walker, which had made him get up in Matt's face and warn him off. Why had he carried out the investigation at all, though? Honestly, he wasn't sure, but suspected that a distinct sense of unease whenever he had to decide if he could trust the man had played a large part. He quite often came to the conclusion that he couldn't, which, since the man was running Command and Control for this operation, did nothing for his nerves...

"Were here to do the grunts dirty work!" called out a man wearing a uniform which carried markings identifying him as a US Ranger-Matt's old unit. Walker smiled at the comment.

"That's right, Harry, were here to take care of business which the regulars can't or won't because their just not able to, not willing to or simply not capable of doing what needs to be done. However, we are _also_ here to dig Al'Quaeda and the Taleban right out of the ground and shoot them in the head _with_ the regulars if necessary. As directly as I can put it, we are here to go where no one else can and leave nothing standing when were done. If they can't, we can. If _we_ can't, were dead, clear? That puts us where no one else can go, doing what no one else will do. Were the hand that snaps the neck, were the foot which kicks ass, were the one's no one ever sees for the best reason, because we've been there first. Am I _clear_?" called out Walker.

His version of a pep talk, Matt knew, he'd heard it before. Why, then, did he suspect that if either Anna or Xenia had been on the podium telling everyone what was what and who was who, people would have been leaping out of their seats and saluting? Total lack of charisma and no gift for public speaking at all where Walker was concerned? Most likely.

"SIR! YES SIR!" called out all of the Special Forces men and officers in the room, although Anna's salute was almost lethargic and practically shambolic. She _really_ didn't like Walker. He had to wonder why...

"Good to hear you say it! Now, no change in assignments for now, except for Delta. Neagley and squad, your on Scout today-and your taking the newbies to track down that Taleban base you've been looking for so they can get their feet wet here the hard way. Have fun, guys. Now..." said Walker, but Matt had really stopped listening. He saw the furious expression on Anna's face for a moment-then he saw the smoky look in her eyes when she turned to look at him... He _really_ needed to have that talk with her, sooner rather than later...

Y

He pulled his mind back to the present, getting back on the job. It was stupid for him to have been anywhere else in any case, this place was so dangerous that ignoring anything for seconds could see Al'Quaeda guerrillas leap out of a hole in the ground and garrotte him with piano wire. He was a professional, there were no excuses. _Focus_, he told himself firmly and coldly, ignoring the crystal-clear ice blue sky letting the searing hot sun throw its burning rays straight down, directly onto his head.

"Matt, did you know that the USA actually bought Alaska from the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century?" asked Xenia, who was striding along next to him, in a conversational tone. Matt blinked, almost stopped and turned to look at her.

"No, that's one I hadn't heard. But, since were trying to track down terrorists and religious fanatics who would literally blow themselves up just to kill one of us can I ask why your asking me now?" he replied, more than a little confused.

"Matt, this is me checking to see if your paying attention, da? I am not to be shot in the back because you were thinking about what to do next. Not all of us have that kind of fancy suit, you know" Xenia replied, glancing down at Matt's grey-black SOC full-form body armour. He and his team weren't wearing their helmets due to high daytime temperatures and the fact that, despite everything military technology was capable of today, the helmets still cut down on hearing and line of sight. Superb for protection, certainly, but in territory where even the steep ground shifted underfoot in the form of rough scree and the smallest ledge could conceal an enemy Sniper or Suicide Bomber they needed every advantage they could get.

Xenia's uniform was more simple, but Matt's professional eye still allowed him to appreciate its easy economy and efficiency. A jet-black Nomex bodysuit covered everything but her hands and head, an anti-flash hood being tucked away behind her neck, the suit being fire and waterproofed he was assured. A state-of-the-art darkened bullet proof shirt covered her entire torso while leaving her arms and legs completely free, the collar riding halfway up her neck as some protection there. She wore skin-tight black leather gauntlets with knuckle spikes as a form of inbuilt knuckledusters that were easily sharp and long enough to tear flesh on her hands, while anti-flash goggle were settled around her neck on the top of her uniform.

Combat webbing indistinguishable from the uniform criss-crossed her chest, clearly containing spare ammo, explosives and a variety of technical gear. She looked ready and willing to handle anything, but her darkened clothes and gear, added to her natural dark, almost feral Gypsy looks made her seem almost a predator in nature somehow. As though she was hunting someone or something out here...

"Matt, while I realise that I am ravishingly beautiful and a darkly seductive creature of the night, would you please stop trying to bare my breasts with your eyes? It is getting quite distracting" said Xenia, with an expression that said she didn't really mind at all. Mark and Paul snickered behind them as Matt almost swallowed his tongue-if Xenia wasn't flirting with him he was High on a variety of very illegal substances-but forced down the flush of embarrassment. So what if she was? He'd give her the same answer he'd give Anna when they talked again-he was spoken for.

"Sorry, I have a few things on my mind and your far more attractive than rocks when I'm preoccupied and want to stare at something to distract me. Where are Anna and her squad now, anyway? Shouldn't you be out scouting the way with them?" Matt replied.

"No, around here Anna and her Delta squad rule Hell, I would be baggage. You, though, need a guide" replied Xenia, with a smirk. _Stupid American's_ she couldn't help but think again, another fine example of them believing that they could find a way in a country where even the elements were constantly trying to kill them. Stubborn and full of pride Russians certainly were-she should know-but they never had the arrogance of these Yankees-

Heavy gunfire suddenly erupted from ahead of them-half a mile ahead, where the Delta's were. The crack of gunfire Xenia immediately identified as coming from AK-47's, weapons she had intimate and extensive experience with. M-18's roared in response as the Delta's returned fire, but all that they heard over comms was static. Then, for a moment, Anna's voice penetrated.

"_...Skrk...Am...chk...fall...ktk...AMBU-!_" spat Anna's voice, a second before Xenia dived flat on the ground. With a whip-crack recoil a high-velocity rifle fired, the shot slamming into Paul's back so hard he fell face-first to the ground with an audible, heavy grunt of pain, only a sharp twist of the head and luck preventing him from suffering a broken nose and lost teeth as his body armour stopped the slug from ripping open his back.

Mark and Matt rotated smoothly, aimed coolly back at the nest of the Sniper as suggested by the direction of his attack and opened fire. Normally, it would have just been a scare move against an opponent in cover with a range advantage to force him to keep his head down. With SOC weapons he'd be lucky to get out alive, Matt knew, the elite Counter Terrorism CIA unit didn't make that kind of mistake with its weapons or its men-a sudden scream wrenched Xenia's head around even as she drew her own Dragunov Snipers rifle. More joined it, until it sounded like the screams of the Damned fighting their way out of Hell come to slaughter the living. Then she saw what was coming and swore as her eyes widened...

Men erupted out of the ground all around even as a horde charged over the summit of the ridge ahead of them, frothing, screaming and even howling in insane fury. Fifteen attackers charged her and the SOC squad wielding machetes, pistols and even with just their bare hands, bloodshot eyes bulging, hands bleeding as they tore their way through and past scree and rubble lying all about. Dressed in rags and tattered boots, wielding old, rusty weapons with no sign of any commanding officer, Xenia recognised a pack of ferals when she saw them. What she didn't understand was how she'd missed them, she _never_ missed people even in hiding unless they were actually dead since they couldn't be trying to kill her.

_Think about it later, Xenia_ she told herself grimly as they charged in. Assuming there was a later...

Blind-sided by the attack, Matt, Mark and Paul were out of position and had no time at all. Xenia took the advice of an old friend and stopped thinking as she charged straight back at them, firing her rifle at point-blank on the run and blowing the spine right out of the nearest even as the bullet ripped apart his heart. She ducked a seconds attack and countered with a fast kick that snapped a knee backwards at the joint on a third as she dropped two with a brutal slash of her rifle butt wielded like a club, bones snapping and flesh tearing as blood flew.

She hit the floor, rolled on her shoulder while dropping her rifle, pulled her pistol and a Bayonet blade, blew the top of a mans head off and tore out the throat of another. A man nicked her right upper arm with the tip of a machete blade, a second before she opened his guts with a back slash and drove his nose up into his brain with a Leopard Punch that smashed him over backwards. She drove in like a tank head-first, getting in too close for their greater numbers to really mean anything against a skilful opponent, head butted another, smashed the skull of a second with her pistol grip and nearly lost her Bayonet in the ribs of another as she pierced his heart.

A man tried to bite her throat, she impaled his head from jaw to brain so sharply the Bayonet stuck out the top of his head and she had to drop it as he fell. She shot another in the stomach before a kick numbed her fingers and forced her pistol out of her hand, but she simply tore his throat out with the blade of her hand before dropping another with a sharp elbow to the face that pushed his face back into his brain.

Diving clear as a bullet grazed her ribs on the left, she picked up two machetes and crashed straight back in, blood and gore erupting in all directions as she cut, slashed and hacked with a butchers precision, severing limbs, ripping out eyes, tearing apart bodies as bones snapped and organs were lacerated, then destroyed in a welter of steel and blood. Worn steel whipped and whirled around and about in her hands as she moved with a dancers elegance and a killers grace, slaughter drenching her and the land in blood, gore and pain.

She suddenly burst clear of the mayhem, finding no one left standing to fight as sharp gunshots sounded about her. She recognised the reports of the weapons, American design, more precisely the SOC standard issue. Sweeping around and about sharply, hawks eyes missing nothing, she took in the battlefield, seeing all three of the SOC squad members standing together with weapons levelled-not at her.

Everyone else was dead, the last twitches of life in a single man being instantly extinguished as she slashed down and sharply decapitated him, kicking the head away. Rising smoothly to her feet, she sheathed the machetes in a body and retrieved her weapons, pausing to spit on the body of the first one she'd killed.

"_Dosvidanya_, vermin. You flea-bitten earth scum never did understand the true nature of the kill. Elegance and style always were beyond you, just like efficiency-_what_?" she snapped abruptly, noticing that Matt had stepped forwards to get a better look at her.

He looked at her steadily for seconds which seemed to last forever, taking in her blood-speckled hair and face, the blood and gore scattered across her clothes and body armour. Her eyes were wild, her expression feral, her entire body almost "twitching" as though she was just getting warmed up and needed to get her teeth into something else, hard.

Just on the eyes she was easily a fantasy when dressed and stone cold sober, but now? Almost high on slaughter and pain, she looked like an Angel come from Hell with bright eyes burning in a way which simply consumed the living. Matt had never seen anything both so disturbingly dangerous in nature and sensual in action. Watching Xenia fight like a Demon or worse, killing, cutting and slaughtering her way through everyone and everything in her path with an awful, efficiently effective grace that was as hypnotic as it was deadly... She butchered with incredible, appallingly efficient ease...

It was possibly the most disturbing and arousing thing he'd ever seen at the same time. If not for Melissa, Matt would have gone with Xenia behind a suitable boulder right that second and done what they had to do. Judging by the look in her eyes, she was thinking the same thing...

"Ah, American boys who think they've seen it all. You boys have never fought in a real war, have you?" said Xenia, with a slight chuckle. Given what he'd just seen, Matt wasn't at all sure how to respond to that...

/End of Chapter Two. All Reviews welcomed./


	3. Chapter 3

For all disclaimers: I know that very little actually happens in this part, but this is most certainly the calm before the storm. Things will get moving very soon, you'll just have to wait and see what I mean. See Chapter One for all other disclaimers.

Faith

Chapter Three

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

Not at all to Matt's surprise, Anna and her Deltas had made short work of a group of attackers, even though they had been much more heavily armed than those after him and his, then made a fast turn and come running back to check of the troops they were "escorting" when radio contact couldn't be re-established. Xenia, covered in blood, fragments of human bodies hanging from her uniform and gear, had been the first to see them coming even as she'd tried to scrape her gear clean. She'd just paused and waved, at which the Delta's had slowed down to a steady trot. Clearly, clean sight of the distinctive Xenia was enough to reassure them that their allies were still alive.

With Mark and Paul checking to make sure all of the dead actually were dead while Xenia tried to clean her gear, Matt had made some attempt to point out to Xenia that she was bleeding from wounds in her arm and side. Her reaction had been to pause, glance at the wounds, say "Oh" and keep working. While he'd been mentally scratching his head, trying to work out a way to persuade Xenia she should let him check her injuries, Anna had arrived, which made things both more and less complicated. More, because of the sly smile she'd shot him, sure that no one but Xenia could see her. Less, because he was sure that Xenia would listen to her-or at least he hoped so.

"Hi, Matt, still not dead then? Good to see you again with everything attached. This place is funny that way, believe me. Xenia, your bleeding you mad bitch. Either stop and fix it or I will, you can't get infected wounds here and you know it" said Anna, glaring at Xenia, who just shrugged.

"Sterile needle and thread, dressing and a little time is all I need. You do it, though, all right? I have to get these bits of flesh and bone out of my rifle now or I'll have to get it serviced by the Armoury staff-and you know what they're like. "_There's a time and there's a place_!" Need anything?" asked Xenia, raising an eyebrow as she unstrapped her gear, weapons, body armour and pack, lowering them gently to the ground. That done, without blinking an eye, she pulled off the upper half of her bodysuit, leaving her wearing nothing above the waist but a bra which was barely decent.

"No, that's fine" replied Anna, pulling out a First Aid kit and going to work on Xenia's injuries. Matt opened his mouth to speak, closed it, opened it and closed it again. This time he couldn't find his voice at all, not while he was getting such a clear view of that particular part of Xenia's body. By the expressions of those people around him, nor could any other man nearby.

Xenia caught his eyes then, very slowly, licked her lips while tracing the fingers of one hand across her washboard-flat stomach, hip to hip, hard muscle rippling. Matt's mouth went as dry as a desert untouched by water for a century as he nearly swallowed his tongue. _...Melissa..._ Was she going to be doing this to him the whole time they were working together? He could see himself standing under an ice-cold shower more often than not while he was out here and near her...

Y

/_That's why they call me the Romanoff Bitch, Matt_/ Xenia thought, feeling the slight prick as Anna's deft hands efficiently and quickly closed her wounds, only the wound in her side really needing any sort of significant attention since the blade had twisted slightly as it cut in, creating a visible bloody gash. Anna tended and dressed all of her wounds with professional skill before withdrawing as she stepped back and away-towards Matt, a fact Xenia didn't miss. Any more than she missed the glance the dark woman shot at Matt.

She'd have to ask Matt just what had happened between him and Anna to get him under Anna's skin like this when she could get him alone privately. She'd never heard of /anybody/ getting Anna's attention like this, let alone keeping it for any real period of time. If she had to judge, Matt had had Anna's attention for years...

Of course, there were still rumours of Anna's long-lost brother and what had happened to him floating around, although all of the details differed depending on which version was in fashion that particular day. The only certain thing was that he /had/ existed, now he was dead-and that loss had nearly broken Anna once and for all. The fact she would never even /discuss/ the matter told the perceptive Xenia everything she needed to know.

Xenia quickly pulled her clothes back on, then retrieved her body armour, gear and weapons, shifting around slightly until they were all properly settled before turning to look at Matt. Unsurprisingly, as soon as she had her clothes back on he had recovered his voice. She wasn't sure if that disappointed her or not...

"What was /that/ all about? Those weren't Taliban or Al'Quaeda troops and don't try to tell me otherwise. I know they weren't just some desperate raiding party, either, simple intelligence says you don't attack groups of heavily armed uniformed men unless your going to die anyway, not when you have half-wrecked defenceless villages and scattered people all over the place. Anybody?" asked Matt, glancing around him.

Xenia shrugged, nodded at Anna and waved a hand at the battered dead bodies all around them. "We call them "Ferals", Matt, survivors of the first War who got /too/ used to it and never found a way to live without it. Men and women who lost everything they had in the killing fields, right down to their minds, people left with only savagery and sex to fill the hole where /they/ used to be" Xenia began, pausing to look closely at the ruined remains of what had to be the first one she'd shot.

"In American you would call them "Combat happy", I believe. Fighting and fucking are the only things which have meaning to them now. They'll fight anyone and everyone, rip you apart with their bare hands, drink your blood and eat the remains just to prove themselves alive. Most of them are Heroin addicts on top of that, meaning whatever was left of their minds and sanity is long gone. They're only dangerous in numbers, but they /will/ eat you raw if they catch you alive and alone. Taliban use them for cannon fodder, before you ask. Shoot first and die last is my only advice. Anything else?" asked Xenia, raising an elegant eyebrow.

Matt looked utterly disgusted-she couldn't blame him-before he spoke again. His question, though, wasn't what she'd expected.

"So, was it as bad as this or worse when you were first here?" he asked. Everyone who could hear the question stopped moving suddenly, wanting to hear the answer. She almost sighed. Well, it wasn't as though she hadn't been expecting this.

"Matt, when I was first here men were being found burnt alive inside truck and car tires, skinned, dismembered, boned and worse on a regular basis, so often that we stopped counting the bodies and the bits just to stop ourselves from screaming all night long. Trust me when I say this, don't ask" replied Xenia.

Matt didn't say another word for the rest of their patrol.

Y

"No, I don't know who they are or what they're doing here. I have links with Military Intelligence, though, so yes, I /will/ find out. I've know Matthew Ryan for a long time, but I'm not willing to play on that to get answers to questions I shouldn't have-and that's final. My way will take longer than espionage, but I'll get you results and you know it. All I need is time".

"_Time is something we do not have a great deal of to spare, regardless of circumstances and individual. DoD Contacts and resources have determined for certain that it is not the Pentagon which ultimately gives the SOC their orders, they answer to the Director of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs directly, giving them carte blanche to do what must be done in the new "War on terror". That makes them particularly dangerous to /us, as you are well aware. This makes the facts simple: we need to know whether or not, absolutely, certainly and finally, SOC assets and resources are being deployed to Afghanistan as a result of intelligence concerning either the activities of Al'Quaeda, for counter-intelligence ops, or to investigate any evidence of external support received by the Taliban and Al'Quaeda. _

_So were clear, we have intel suggesting there is political pressure coming down from the Oversight Committee on the Armed Forces, via Senators who don't like even the notion of an effectively autonomous Black Ops intelligence-focused Special Forces unit with close links to the CIA being operational in the field. If this is the case, we may be able to make effective penetration. If not, we need you to tell us the facts for certain so we can deal with the situation as it presents itself. Take what time you need to get these facts to us, but don't /waste/ time. Understood?_"

"Understood. I'll be in touch. Out".

Y

Back in camp after a long day under the hot sun, Xenia found a shaded wall to lean against out of the sun and shut out the world for a few minutes to get away from it all. As dusk began to fall, her sharp eyes noted dusky clouds starting to gather over the mountaintops, smaller and larger groups evidently moving towards convergence more and more as time went on.

In all honesty, she didn't know that much about the weather in Afghanistan, that had never been her area of expertise. But, she'd been all around the world, north and south of the Equator plenty of times, travelled to and over three continents by land, sea and air and-most importantly here-she'd seen and experienced rainstorms in South America in the worst imaginable conditions.

Her lips shifted into a trace of a smile as she recalled fighting her way through trees streaming thick spurts of water from huge leaves which could blind you any second, wading through mud which stuck to you in a way it took a high pressure hose to shift up to the waist. Dodging Quicksand and flash floods, riding improvised rafts over all-new shallow rivers created by monsoon rainstorms, tumbling down rapids and going over sudden waterfalls without even time to shriek before you were six feet under with a ton of water falling straight onto your head. Running for her life away from annoyed villagers who were shooting at her with bows and arrows carrying stone heads because she'd tried to buy a canoe without realising the villagers hadn't seen a white man or woman since the Spanish invasion over five hundred years earlier and had long, bad memories...

For all the madness, mayhem and bloodshed, she'd actually had the time of her life down there and was seriously considering buying a permanent home in a very little known part of the jungle, unknown because the owners made sure everyone forgot about it unless they could afford to remember. After going on a decade of high-order Mercenary action, Wetwork, Black Ops, killing missions, Espionage for whoever paid the most, she had more than enough put away to afford the price and more. The question was, would she rather Retire there or somewhere quieter, so far out of the way even the chance of her discovery was as remote as the chance of President Bush being honest? That, she still had to make a decision on.

She brought her mind back to the subject at hand, the clouds gathering over the mountains. Yes, she /did/ know all the signs, there was going to be a thunderstorm soon-a very big one. Good, this land was so humid at the best of times she'd been tempted to locate a secluded pool where she could go to cool off whenever she felt the need, but there were far too many good male trackers amongst the Americans and the Allied forces. She knew for a fact what would have happened and, quite simply, didn't need people fantasising about "the Russki bitch" any more than they already did. Let alone salivating over any inappropriate photographs of her...

The thunderstorm, when it came, would do a great deal to disperse the oppressive humidity and make it comfortable, for a while at least. Then it would be back to sweating like a pig and trying hard not to faint in the overwhelming heat under all the armour and gear you had to wear and carry, even without weapons, just to stay alive in this damned place. Well, she could live with that. Russians were bred to the cold, certainly, but they enjoyed the heat as much as anyone on earth when it came. She'd just have to take a little time off somewhere cool or simply downright cold for a while after all this was over.

In the meantime, she decided that it would be nice to stand around outside and enjoy the rain, warm though it would certainly be, when it came. The barrack structures were fine for her to retreat to when she needed some peace and quiet-or not.

She'd been getting...hints...from an SAS Sergeant who was tall, rangy and good looking in the same way a wolf was, hard-faced and firm-bodied with the compact, lean muscle that only came with years of hard physical labour-and not from pumping iron in a gym for six hours a day. She'd seen plenty of both in her time, more than enough to tell the difference, so she looked for more in her men if it was going to be more than a fling.

The SAS man had stone cold eyes and a ruthless manner which told her she was looking at a cold-blooded killer, but what had finally drawn her interest was the fact that, in combat and day to day, he moved like a dancer with quite remarkable physical grace. As she well knew, a man who moved like that did /everything/ like that. Homicidal tendencies and very likely a God in bed? After twenty-two years on the job he was over forty, but age didn't bother her. She was /more/ than tempted…

Then there was Matt? Well…

Y

Matt was beginning to suspect that, after less than two days, he was never going to get used to the overwhelming heat and humidity of this country. He'd thought New York and its long, hot summers was bad, when it got so hot and sticky that all you could do was lie inside with a glass of cool water, the air conditioning on full and all the windows wide open, but this? This was on a different scale of hot. It was out of the frying pan and head first into the fire with gas turned all the way up.

SOC body armour was full-body and extensive, designed and fitted to provide the maximum possible amount of protection while supplying the least amount of weight to enable speed, agility and reaction time to be as close as possible to the norm. It was also as well-filtered as possible, with perfectly placed padding and vents to allow air to circulate freely while allowing for the suit to be made airtight if necessary in an emergency. It didn't change the fact that the suit put you inside a pressure cooker which made you feel as though your head was going to explode if you wore it for too long, while the weaponry and gear caused such massive physical exertion when added to the armour that he wasn't sure he'd have survived trying to run for any real distance in full kit and armour in these conditions.

All of that combined had, once their orientation patrol session was over, led to Matt literally putting his entire head under a cold tap and staying in that position for at least five minutes. Then he'd grabbed a chilled bottle of water, dragged his shirt off over his head and stepped outside as the shadows of dusk began to fall, looking for and quickly finding a well-shaded area, where he collapsed in only his combat leggings and undone boots. Hard, rough stone wall behind him against his back, dusty concrete, stone and mud floor beneath his feet and backside and, if he was being honest, it felt like he was relaxing into soft cushions. That meant he was very tired, not at all to his surprise.

He heard the footsteps a moment before he registered the presence of the man, then glanced up to confirm what he believed. Tom Walker, SOC commanding officer for the whole of their operations in Afghanistan, was standing over him. He was holding a half-full bottle of water and was dressed just like Matt was, the hard muscularity of his arms and chest slick with sweat and rippling as he moved. Matt and he had worked out together in the past because they both worked for the SOC, even though they didn't socialise, so Matt knew Tom came by his powerful physique through honest hard effort over hours of time every day. Matt also knew that Tom took so much trouble to stay in top shape he'd hired a physical trainer to sculpt his body into the most impressive appearance possible, a fact which few people knew for a good reason since Tom actively discouraged any comment on his personal life. Matt found it all quite funny in reality, even a little silly, but he couldn't say that on the record to his superior officer.

"Mind if I join you, Matt?" asked Tom, raising the water bottle to his lips and taking a long swig. Matt just shook his head no, so Tom sat down clear of Matt and sighed in some relief.

"Bloody country, weathers worse than Death Valley on a bad day back in the States. Natives toddle along regardless in their turbans and sheepskins, smiling like they know some great secret to coping with it all rather than having to admit that they wing it and hope for the best just like the rest of us poor bastards. I'm surprised we haven't had rats at the food stores yet, myself, I know a lot of people have been in the Infirmary with heat exhaustion and bruises from passing out on the job. No SOC, though, so that's something" said Tom, swigging back more water before throwing back his head with a sigh.

"So, how did your orientation tour go? With Anna there, I'm sure you had plenty to think about. With Xenia too, I doubt you had time to think of much else. Just the skinny, Matt, I know your report will be on my desk tomorrow morning" asked Tom, shooting a sharp glance at Matt. Obviously, Matt reflected, Tom hadn't forgotten the "welcome" he'd received from both Anna and Xenia on literally his first night on the job here. Well, that was just tough. If Tom wanted to go digging about any history there, he could go through Personnel Files. Tom wasn't the only one who was protective of his privacy.

"Long story short, Anna and her Deltas split up with Xenia and us, which led to us being ambushed by a group of what Xenia and Anna call ferals while Anna and her team were jumped out of sight of us. No contest, Anna and her people just killed them all while Xenia went a little crazy on us with a pair of machetes and cut them into chunks to make sure they knew she was angry. Beyond that, it was fine, really just physical orientation and acclimatising. Any tips for that?" replied Matt, looking at Tom as he spoke.

"Just the usual one's, Matt. Don't even dare try and overdo it in these conditions, if you think you might sit down and rest, take five if you have to. Drink plenty of water, rationing here is only good when you have to make sure your not going to run out. Also, when it gets dark here, wrap up tight and sleep soundly for as long as you can manage, the temperature gets way down at night here and its only when it gets that way that its at all comfortable to try and flake out for any real length of time" said Tom, before pausing to take a breath.

"It takes time to get used to all of this and, understand me, you /cannot/ rush all of this under any circumstances here. You think the terrain is bad? It is, make a wrong step and you'll end up under a mountainside with a million tons of rock flattening you into a red smear where you'll never be found. But the weather? That can really kill you just by way of you thinking you can handle it. Even if you've been here before, make no mistake that this is your first time all over again. Learn fast and work hard, Matt, you get very few second chances here" said Tom, looking at Matt in such a way that Matt knew he was dead serious. Great pep talk Tom, he thought but again couldn't say aloud...

"As for the ferals...occupational hazard in this country in the same way rebels, guerrillas and terrorists are everywhere outside of the USA bar some bits of Europe. They survived the invasion and eventual retreat of the USSR, but someone forgot to tell them that this meant they could stop fighting so now they kill anything and everything they come across so they don't /have/ to think about anyone or anything else. Think of them all as having started off Psychotic and now not only being completely combat-happy but Heroin addicts rotting from the inside out as well. Their minds were the first thing to go, trust me on that. You see them? Shoot to kill and run like Hell the opposite direction, off a cliff if that's what it takes to avoid capture. The only thing worse than being killed by them is being captured by them, trust me on that" said Tom, swigging water again as Matt did the same.

"Its funny, but Xenia said almost exactly that when I asked her" said Matt, with a shrug. "Guess you just don't hear about things like that outside of the land they live in" her continued, licking his lips to moisturise them.

Tom snorted. "The Romanoff Bitch told you that? She was trying to scare you, so it had better not have worked-" he began, but was cut off by a new voice as someone appeared in front of them so suddenly that Matt was actually startled. Getting the drop on him was /not/ an easy thing to do.

"If she was trying to scare Matt, Thomas, she would have had him shaking like a leaf in a hurricane before she finished speaking. If you have ways of asserting your authority /without/ insulting your men's intelligence and my /real/ friends honesty, I suggest you employ them before she finds out about this with anyone else you might talk to. You can leave now, by the way" said the new arrival. Matt immediately recognised her voice, knowing who she was even before he looked up.

_Anna_. Who else would it have been? Special Forces soldiers wanted to grow up to be her, she probably wouldn't have disturbed the air around them getting close if she didn't want to. In any case, there had been a strong sense of animosity between Tom and her which hadn't been hard to pick up on just on first sight of them in each others presence.

He had to wonder just what Tom had done to piss off Anna, though. He /knew/ that doing something so stupid came /high/ on the list of bad ideas, so high that only a man as dense as Tom where women were concerned, particularly women like Anna, would be stupid enough to do something to set her off. He'd have to ask Anna some time...

Tom stood up slowly, glaring at Anna and snarling with curled lips, but he wasn't feeling suicidal enough to do something as stupid as throw a punch, apparently, so he just shot Anna the most contemptuous stare Matt had ever seen and stalked off. "Be careful about your friends, Matt" he shot off over his shoulder, even as he headed back towards the officers quarters.

Anna just watched him go, then sat down next to Matt, leaned her head on his shoulder and leaned her long body against him. Her skin was gleaming with sweat, which he couldn't help but notice made her t-shirt and combat trousers stick to her statuesque figure in all kinds of interesting ways, but it was obvious her dark skin was protecting her from the worst excesses of the climate in a way the overwhelmingly pale-skinned Caucasian other soldiers, including him, couldn't hope to match. The feel of her body against his side and arm felt very good indeed, as well. He'd almost forgotten just how curvy she was, in all the right ways and places.

"This brings back memories...can I ask you something, Matt?" she asked. He wasn't sure that he'd ever seen that particular expression on her face before as she spoke, almost one of longing...

Y

It was starting to rain by the time Xenia's wanderings around the camp led her to Anna and Matt's almost-intimate close embrace, Matt having one arm around Anna's shoulders while Anna leaned into his right side along her full length. She didn't doubt for a second that they were just comforting each other in a strange place in a strange world, but nine out of every ten people who saw Anna doing that with /anybody/ would have, at the very least, had a double-take to be sure of just what they were looking at. Besides which, the body language of both said they were far more than just comfortable in each others physical company. So comfortable, in fact, that Anna was almost purring, not that Matt appeared to have noticed.

She stopped, stood and simply stared at the two of them for a few seconds, until they both lazily shifted to look straight at her. Then Anna's lips drifted upwards into an almost sly smile.

"Feel like a swim, Xenia?" asked Anna, an almost bizarre question that Xenia wasn't quite sure how to answer. Matt tried to keep what he was thinking off of his face, but had nothing like Anna or Xenia's self-control and she knew that he knew something he wasn't going to let on about concerning Anna's question. That just made her more intrigued-and made her decision easy.

"Da, I would love to" she replied, wondering just what Anna had in mind and precisely what she was letting herself in for...

/End of Chapter Three. All Reviews welcomed./


	4. Chapter 4

For all disclaimers: See previous Chapters.

Faith 

Chapter Four

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

Anna got them past the gate guards with a nod and a quick word, after which they were off, Anna quickly leading the way up into the mountains, all of them only armed with an M-16 and pistol each with one clip a weapon. She didn't say a word to either of them, just led them on with a confident stride. He had to wonder just where they were going, regardless, even though he trusted her.

The rain had started to fall with some force even as the wind kicked up hard enough to have both women's hair whipping around their faces and throats, Matt, despite being sure on his feet, often finding the pebbles and dirt being blown into his eyes making the going difficult. It didn't stop any of them, let alone wipe the amused smile off of Xenia's face for a moment, but Matt did find himself wondering if whatever Anna had in mind was still going to be worth it if the weather continued to get worse. Of course, he didn't actually /know/ what Anna had in mind, so only time would tell.

They moved some way up a particular mountain, then on into a cave. The pace Anna set should have quickly left the light behind, but Matt soon discovered that high cracks in the walls allowed in a little sunlight, while some sort of natural blue-green luminescence provided all of the visibility they might have needed. They made a series of turns through tunnels, at least once doubling back on themselves as far as he could tell, before he started to hear the rumbling sounds up ahead which told him what it was they were heading for.

Sure enough, they came into a long, sloping passage which ran downwards sharply, one which turned out to be covered in running water ceilings, walls and floor, a stream underfoot making it all particularly treacherous. They edged their way down it until they came to the very mouth, then Anna edged out onto a ledge running around the outside rim and gestured outwards. "Well, what do you think?" she asked, inviting them to take a look even as the rumbling turned into a roar of sound and motion.

Matt stuck his head out into the open space revealed beyond the tunnel, making sure he had a solid hold first, then whistled. "Impressive" was all that he could think to say-and it was.

The exposed area was a huge underground cavern, one so broad he couldn't see the roof, floor and most of the walls, a fair-sized waterfall running past him from the very top of a broad plateau of rock which sat maybe ten feet above where he was standing into the deep darkness below. He could glimpse shimmering silver ripples where it was landing which suggested a considerable pool of water, but even with the phosphoresce created by what he presumed were forms of plant life and fungi supplied by the water he couldn't clearly see that far down to be sure. He noticed something odd and looked up as sharply as he could-up above the plateau, leading out onto the surface, was a massive natural chimney which had to reach up through almost ten metres of solid rock. Heavy rain was sheeting down through the chimney into the cavern, forming a silver wall against which a flash of lightning was briefly illuminated, followed by a long, echoingly loud rumble of thunder from the worsening storm.

"Interesting place" he said, glancing around himself again before shifting back to come face-to face with Anna, who was on the very verge of kissing him given her expression, a fierce grin on her face. He grinned back, tempted to respond. After all, he knew what weather like this did to Anna...

"Yes, impressive. Just one thing, Anna...are you expecting us to dive off of this rim into that pool down there? I ask because I, for one, do not wish to die that much" said Xenia, cutting in on Matt and Anna. Anna's smile became a smirk.

"No, we climb up there and /then/ we dive back down. So were clear, I found this place when I fell in here through that chimney and got washed off the plateau down into the pool at the bottom, suffice to say that sole scouting missions in the dead of night are not a good idea in unfamiliar terrain. I was nearly knocked unconscious and fell forty foot into the pool before I came back up again, then I spent five minutes coughing up all of the water I'd swallowed. I had to climb out with my bare hands and work my way through the tunnels back to solid ground, took me two hours and makes me sure no one else knows were here. The pool is thirty foot deep and fifty wide with an underwater passage you shouldn't try and swim where all the water escapes. Trust me, its safe. So, who wants to go first?" asked Anna, raising an eyebrow.

"If were climbing, I'm leading. What is the point of jumping headlong into the unknown if you are not the first, da?" said Xenia, edging her way onto the ledge Anna was on before reaching up and finding handholds, then footholds. The rock was rough and worn by weather and water, it had to be slippery from condensation if nothing else, yet as soon as she found her rhythm Xenia made it look easy, long legs powering her up the climb as strong arms anchored her, powerful muscles rippling as she moved with exceptional grace from hold to hold. She took less than five minutes to reach the top, then pulled herself over it and disappeared-just as an almighty crash of thunder roared and echoed outside.

Startled, Matt actually jumped, lost his footing and skidded frantically out of control before, spinning in mid air, his fingernails caught in a death grip on the edge of the ledge Anna was standing on. That smirk she'd been wearing was back and she looked slightly amused-as well as completely unphased. Typical, he should have expected that. He'd been in and fought his way through plenty of hairy situations where he'd gotten in and out only through a combination of mad luck, massive amounts of gunfire and explosions and a frantic determination not to die, added to no little applied skill of course. He'd also had very capable help in the form of his friends and allies, of course. But Anna?

From what little he did know about her, her speciality was Counter-Terrorism and Insurgency work added to Bodyguard duties where the individual being guarded was so important that to mention his or her name and mission would get you killed in public. Her history was made up of so many "Eyes Only" Black Op and Black Book stamps, Wetwork missions and any number of off-the-record never-happened jobs that it was a wonder she was allowed to socialise to him sometimes-and he knew what little he had heard barely scratched the surface. To expect her to get scared or shocked by /any/ weather conditions was like expecting Al Gore to have actually won the election against Bush, Jnr. years after the fact, utterly damn stupid. He made a mental note to see what he could /really/ find out about her before all this was over and they went their separate ways again...

"Well? Are you going to help me up?" he asked, suspecting that he knew the answer already given her expression.

"Nah. Race you to the top, though" she said with a grin, even as he felt his fingers slipping on the slimy rocks. He gritted his teeth. Fine, if that was the way she wanted it...

Y

Xenia had found the climb easy given some she'd had-climbing thirty storeys up the outside of a building in atrocious weather with no safety lines in the dark, after which she'd had to open a locked window from the outside kneeling on a six-inch ledge without waking the owners asleep inside, for example-but she wasn't expecting what she found when she pulled herself up onto the plateau properly. For one thing, not all of the sound was coming from the waterfall, as it turned out.

There was a literal full-scale river running through the plateau in a bed which had to be three feet deep at least, a good eight feet wide on top of that. The plateau was so broad it left another six feet clear either side of the river, but the river current was strong enough to force the water at speed over rocks and debris fallen down the chimney, creating a steady rumble of sound that only grew louder as it approached the drop-off point for the waterfall. White water showed in places and the water, occasionally and often, splashed up and over the channel to near her feet. The river seemed to be coming out of the far wall in the cavern, but she knew enough about geology to be sure that this was a surface river which had submerged at some point and been narrowed down to the point its natural speed and strength had been greatly enhanced. Impressive-and she hadn't known a thing about it, which was even more impressive.

Trust Anna to have found a place which it was likely no one else knew about, especially the way she said she had. Anna was harder than granite and less yielding than a volcanic eruption when things got in her way. The shock of an abrupt and unexpected thirty-foot fall followed by a tumble through a fast-running small river, leading to a forty-foot fall off a cliff through a waterfall which had to have tossed her into a deep pool of water still carrying all of her gear and weapons? Anna would only have been bothered by the fact it was going to take her time to climb back out of the place since she didn't know the route, it would have taken broken bones to even slow her down. There was a good reason Anna's Call Sign was a Demon name.

Maybe she could use this place to relax if she could persuade Anna to share? She could recall the route easily enough and this was /_not_/ a place easily found or reached by anyone. Calling Anna an expert tracker and hunter was an insult to the gifted woman's almost preternatural skills, she /never, ever/ got lost or lost someone she was tracking. If she wanted to find you, it was only a matter of time...

Xenia stepped up to the edge and saw Anna quickly climbing the slippery rock face, with Matt a little way below her still dragging himself back onto the ledge they'd all started on after evidently almost taking a tumble. Anna made the climb look even easier than /she/ had, dextrous, strong fingers closing on rough edges of slippery rock, sure feet finding every edge and hole, powerful body flexing as her muscles pulled her up the rocks. Again, just watching Anna move, Xenia was almost disappointed that she didn't think of women /that/ way. Not that the fact she liked men prevented her from enjoying the view...

Anna pulled herself up and over the edge, stood up easily and strode over to Xenia with her distance-eating steady soldiers stride. Relaxing a little, Anna tapped a foot as her eyes tracked across the cavern before she looked over at Xenia with an arched eyebrow. "You like?" she asked, with a smile.

"Very much, yes" replied Xenia, her answering smile sly as she caught Anna's double meaning. The cavern was a superbly out of the way location, certainly, a place where anyone who appreciated natural beauty and having real time to relax could come to be uninterrupted doing both, but that wasn't the only reason Anna had invited Xenia and Matt, particularly, down there with her and Xenia knew it.

"Open competition?" asked Anna, glancing over at Matt as he finally caught up with them, hauling himself over the edge of the plateau at last. Xenia let her eyes track across Matt's body and decided that she didn't mind what she was seeing, not at all. Handsome, young and very fit, with the way he moved? She almost felt like purring.

"Certainly" she replied, to a silent nod and wink from Anna. What was it they said these days? Oh, yes/the games afoot, that seemed appropriate. She wondered if Matt had any idea what was coming his way...

"Before you two starting plotting whatever it is your having girl talk about, I /really/ need to tell you something. I'm engaged, alright? I have a Fiancée back in the States, her names Melissa and I love her, very much, so just stop checking me out will you?" asked Matt, looking exasperated as he stood up and walked over to them. Xenia felt rather than saw Anna's answering smile.

"So now wouldn't be a good time to point out I have no trouble at all with the idea of being a Mistress, then?" replied Anna, an answer which visibly left Matt at a total loss for words. The smouldering look she sent Matt as she spoke would have made most men's hair stand on end, it was no little to Matt's credit that he stood up to it.

"I believe you mean that. I also believe that I have commitment issues, the kind which mean once I've made a commitment, I stick to it. I'd walk over hot coals to reach you under any ordinary circumstances, Anna, but I already have someone to look forwards to getting back to. Same for you, Xenia, sorry" said Matt, glancing at them one after the other.

A massive roar of thunder echoed outside, seeming to almost shake the mountainside and the cavern they were in. For a long second a brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the cavern so brilliantly that it was like being inside a searchlight, then everything temporarily went back to what passed for normal again. The rain only intensified, reaching torrential downpour conditions that swept down through the chimney with such force it sounded and almost felt as though the sea itself was battering at the roof and walls of the cavern.

Xenia wasn't spooked by much but that sound was downright eerie, dangerous too. Worse, though, was the fact that she could tell the water level on the plateau was rising, the water running faster and faster past them as it did. Wherever the rivers source was, it was taking in the avalanche of downpour hard and fast and feeding it through far faster than was safe, for them and who knew where else. They needed to get /out/ of here/now, but Matt and Anna were too busy trying to square off to one another still to pay any real attention.

What to do, though? Slapping Anna to get her attention would have resulted in a broken wrist-had she ever worked in Intelligence? She really /was/ getting old, there was a simple way to get the attention of both Anna and Matt-

A grinding crack not far away, almost above them, was followed by the awful creaking of massive stones under terrible stresses. The entire cavern seemed to move underfoot, the river flowing across the plateau almost completely dried up and they were all suddenly drenched as steams of water erupted from the roof everywhere. The water wasn't freezing cold but it was close and it, combined with the sheer shock of what was happening, made them all shut up and glance around themselves suddenly. If Xenia had been a cat, she knew her hackles would have been up. Her instincts, which she knew were good and never ignored, which kept her alive, were screaming at her. Something was /VERY/ wrong here.

"I don't suppose either of you happens to be a trained Geologist? I'll settle for any idea what's going on, by the way" Matt whispered, sounding scared.

"Do I look like I live in a cave, Matt? I think the mountainside is shifting, settling I hope, because if it isn't we might all be dead. Were inside a mountain and deep underground, if the damn rock face moves too much they won't find our bones for a decade if were lucky and they use DNA to identify the remains. If were unlucky, a million tons of rock falls down on us, we go splat and only Mother Nature ever knows we were here. Whatever you believe in, pray to him, her or it now" replied Xenia, staring sharply about her, taking in everything at once.

"It gets worse, Xenia. Ever seen a tidal surge in an enclosed area at sea level filled with people and buildings? A big one, even? I've seen too many bad things too many times, I can see this one coming. The rivers still flowing here, but the pressures built up so much that it's pressing against the walls rather than passing through it and building up an air bubble. Enough pressure against that wall? Boom, we get hit by shrapnel and a small gale before being blasted backwards off this plateau by water pressure which will make us feel as though we've been hit by artillery fire. We have to get /out/ of here" snapped Anna, uneasily eyeing the wall the water was still slowly trickling under.

"Has anybody else noticed that the floor is moving?" interjected Matt conversationally, trying to drive away his fear with flippancy. Both women glared at him, but he'd at least succeeded in distracting them for a moment.

They waited tensely, Matt crossing his fingers, all well aware that the only possible way out while the earth tremor continued was diving into the pool below, where there were no guarantees of safety or security to be had at all, even less than there were now. It seemed to take forever, but was more like ten minutes when the shaking slowly subsided excepting the occasional tremor. Xenia couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief-

The monstrous lightning bolt seared the retinas of all three of them, dropping Xenia onto her hands and knees as she gasped helplessly in pain, Anna sagging back in agony against the wall with gritted teeth and terrifying strength of Will holding in any expression of pain. Matt couldn't help a brief yelp before he lost his footing and landed back-first with a massive thud in the almost-dry riverbed, an impact which sent streaks of pain up and down his body. All any of them could do was grab at their eyes, shake their heads and wait for it all to pass. As it happened, they didn't have time.

A roar of chaotic physical fury which sounded like the gates of Hell being opened for the first time since Christ died echoed everywhere around and about them as though the planet itself was letting out an insane bellow of pain and rage. Everyone within a mile of the focus of the sound was left temporarily deafened, blood pouring from ears and nose as terrific pressure changes shifted the air patterns of the entire area in a way which suggested the massive affected region had temporarily been opened to space itself.

The ground itself seemed to physically jump a foot, Anna being catapulted head first against an extension of the wall she was leaning against with such force she was knocked unconscious with an audible crack of bone on rock. Xenia found herself spinning through the air like a whirligig and landed on her left side with enough force to bruise, her head spinning as though she'd been twisted and turned like a top in a mad child's hands, leaving her unable to even determine the directions of up and down. Matt was catapulted back into the air, slammed back down again and rolled like log almost fifteen feet before flailing hands and feet got hold of a solid enough grip to stop him. He felt blood on his forehead and left cheek, knew he was bleeding but didn't have time to think.

Xenia muzzily shifted as something caught her attention through the dim haze that was trying to put her down and out, even as her battered body and mind fought to compensate and reorientate her. She blinked once, twice, then almost swallowed her tongue in utter shock at what she saw as she found herself looking upwards at the sky above even as the chimney started to disintegrate right next to her. The /roof/ was coming down on them...

The clouds and the rains were gone, the winds had reached hurricane force suddenly, or so it seemed, but none of that was what scared her almost to death. No, what did that was much worse, not to mention simply impossible...

The sky was on fire, lit a swirling orange-red mixed with traces of bleached white and dark black that just might have been the remnants of clouds. The wind was literally screaming around and all about, she could feel it physically shifting sizeable boulders from the heavy crashing and thuds all about on the surface. Smaller objects large enough to physically lift were being swept right up into the sky even as she watched, Xenia suspecting that smaller specks she couldn't identify with just her eyes were animals and even people unlucky enough to have been caught up in the maelstrom from Hell... Had someone set off an Atomic Bomb? What the Hell else could do /this?

Sounds abruptly punched through to her numbed brain for a few seconds, screams and shouts, crashing stone echoing everywhere, Matt shouting, water racing... Semi-conscious or not, her smart mind quickly put all of the pieces together. All the same, she wasn't quick enough.

Her head snapped around and down to let her see the wall where the water had been coming towards them from. It wasn't there any longer. The entire structure of nature which had been holding back the massive flow was disintegrating in front of her eyes, sending shards of rock whipping past like knife blades, one slashing across her lower chest so quick and fast she barely even felt it as the edge bit into her flesh and blood instantly began to flow. Spurts and explosions of water were erupting in all directions but behind all of that, washing almost a ton of shattered and broken rock straight at her, was enough water to fill half the cavern coming on at a speed a Leopard couldn't have run.

She was helpless as a newborn child and barely able to move she was so knocked around. She thought she was dead-then she saw a stirring Anna get pushed off of the wall, where she'd collapsed, blood streaming down from a head wound at the back of her skull, before being thrust forwards by pressure which tossed her bodily forwards towards the edge of the plateau as though she was less than a pebble. Anna's eyes blinked open, but Xenia glimpsed her face and she could see that one eyeball was full of blood. She wasn't sure that, with a head injury as severe as that, Anna would be capable of moving even to save her own life-

Anna's hands slashed out like claws and dug into handholds as though they were the last thing between her and the end of the world. She stopped moving so abruptly Xenia almost believed the water flow had let go of her for a moment, then she noticed the bunched muscles and white knuckles. With an injury that would have put most people in a Hospital Bed for a week, Anna Neagley was still willing and able to fight for her life...

It was as though anchor chains weighing her down had been cut. Just as the water hit her like a battering ram, led by lethal shards of stone and an awfully powerful physical force behind the stone, Xenia fought her way to her feet, turned and ran for her life, straight towards the edge of the plateau and the pool beneath it. A new shard gashed her upper left leg, something clipped her right shoulder, something else again punched her in the back. She ignored it all, even as she took in a desperate Matt scrambling for the edge as well, slipping and sliding in the maelstrom but fighting like Hell to survive.

Anna saw them coming as they raced for the edge, just above where she grimly held on, somehow managed a smile-then let go and vanished from sight in a heartbeat. Xenia got there next and went over head-first without even slowing down in a Swan Dive which was ridiculously graceful for the circumstances, plunging down straight and clean as an arrow even as Matt took the direct approach and simply threw himself off of the plateau, heading down with arms and legs spiralling until he hit.

Xenia hit the cold water with a shock on contact, but dived only deeper, looking for the underwater exit passage Anna had mentioned, knowing that it might be suicide but they had no other options left. She was a far better swimmer than Matt, she noted, as he came up fast behind her using a frantic crawl stroke which she could easily have outdistanced with her predators easy distance-drinking practised stroke, but now /really/ wasn't the time to be thinking of that. Spotting the passage, along with a possible trace of Anna's blood in the water, she dived deep and went straight in, Matt hard on her heels.

The water began to hammer in on top of them, led by big rocks and sharp shards that landed with enough force to tear right through the human body with a clean hit. Xenia poured on the power and accelerated sharply, leaving Matt in her wake, just getting inside the exit tunnel before something awfully big and solid bounced so near that a seconds delay would have broken both her legs at best. It got in Matt's way, so completely that she was forced to turn back and help, getting hold of his forearms and physically pulling him through with sheer brute strength, shredding his clothes and cutting his chest half to shreds in the process.

The moment he was through she turned and kicked away, slicing through the water like a shark as fast as she could even as she felt the water hammering down, causing massive disturbances in the water that tried to throw her against every edge even as she powered on, forcing her to use all of her strength just to keep moving in a straight line. The flow of water rapidly began to increase as well, speeding her pace up sharply and making passage increasingly rough. She could hold her breath for four minutes, Anna-when healthy-was four and a half, Matt she didn't know-and she wasn't sure it mattered. If there was no way out, then they'd all committed Suicide down here with an escape attempt anyway.

She paused a moment, struggled with the belt holding her pistol and gear, then unlatched it and let it go, her rifle long gone. Of all things she didn't need right now, extra ballast which could slow her down so those few, precious extra seconds which might mean the difference between life and death floated away was right at the top of the list. She didn't doubt that Matt had done the same thing, but wondered just how the seriously injured Anna was keeping ahead of them like this. /Was/ she, in fact? Or was she simply being forced through by the current?

She glanced around at the passage they were all passing through, barely six feet wide and three tall, with no end in sight and relatively clear water running through it rapidly being clogged up by much and debris from above. Corners, jagged edges and dips were everywhere, even black holes which could have led anywhere she didn't dare try for. Starting to feel her lungs burn, she increased her pace again-and saw a glimmer of pale light ahead that couldn't have come form any form of underwater illumination. Light, she was seeing daylight...

She spotted the dark smears on the rocks just by the lapping pools edge even as she fought her way up to the pool, finding that she had to roll over and drag herself into the pool upside down head first as she did. She felt her head break water, wrenched hard as she felt rather than saw a half-drowned Matt come up behind her with frantic haste and got head and shoulders clear, fighting the rest of her body up and out even as she drew in deep, ragged breaths of cold, clean air. Something stabbed her in the back again in the same place she'd been hit in the cavern even as she fought loose, sending a spike of sharp agony through her, but she ignored it. She didn't have time to be hurt right now.

She scrambled to her feet, staggered a few feet then fell to her knees, gasping and choking even as she heard Matt gagging for air as he dragged himself clear behind her. It was no minor Miracle they were all still alive, no questions asked...

"Its not over yet" said Anna loudly suddenly, obviously to force her words past the remains of the deafening impact in the cavern, almost making Xenia jump as she spoke unexpectedly. Xenia looked wildly around herself, taking in the small cave barely tall enough for her six-foot frame to stand upright in, various natural formations and a tall, thick crack in the roof which led all the way to the surface, providing them with the dim light available, before settling on Anna as the younger woman stood on the other side of the cave. When she saw Anna, though, she had to stop and stare.

Anna had stripped down to her bra and combat shorts, her clothes discarded to one side but for her shirt, which was tightly wadded against her head and quickly becoming soaked with blood. Blood was still streaming down over Anna's back and shoulders, but Xenia suspected that the rough trip through the water-filled passage had done more to prevent the bleeding from even beginning to clot or slow than anything else. If Anna had been so injured that the bleeding couldn't be stopped without medical attention even she wouldn't have been on her feet, an ability to manage pain and sheer force of will simply were not enough to override such massive physical injuries. It didn't take away from the fact that Anna had been knocked unconscious by an extremely violent impact, or the fact that one eye was terribly bloodshot meant something was seriously wrong /inside/ her head.

All of it also failed to take away from the simple fact that Anna Neagley was always going to be one of the most beautiful women anyone could ever see, let alone meet. With her body, soaking wet and dressed like that? Even covered in blood and marked as she was? Xenia found herself forced to simply stop and stare against her will. Fortunately, Matt gave her a sharp shove from behind which woke her up.

"The waters still rising, Anna, we can't stay here" said Matt, loudly, looking straight at the battered woman. Xenia didn't doubt he was taking a very good look too, but at least was able to keep his mind on the problem at hand as well.

"No, we can't, so we have to go through here" replied Anna, gesturing to her left and a shadowed hole Xenia had barely noticed before. She stepped forwards to get a better look, only to see a three-foot drop barely wide enough to take Matt's broad shoulders leading who-knew-where, reached by the simple act of stepping in and letting a fast current of whipped water take you. She swore in Russian, then shook her head and looked back over at where they'd come in. The water level was visibly rising even as she watched; it was only a matter of time until they drowned in here.

"This is going to kill us, you do realise that?" she said, looking at Matt and Anna pointedly. Anna didn't even blink while Matt just shrugged. Xenia sighed, then stripped down to Anna's level of dress while Matt got down to his shorts, revealing well-defined muscles Xenia appreciated with a glance she was sure he didn't even notice. Then she paused. /What the Hell.../ she thought, suddenly.

She and Matt were the same height, so she had no need to reach up or down to grab his head and pull his lips to hers. Instead, she just reached out, pulled him into her and held him tight before kissing him passionately. To her surprise-and his, she discovered later-he responded. In fact, it turned out he was a very good kisser...

He looked stunned as she slowly pulled away, even as she felt water beginning to lap at her bare feet. She didn't have to think to know that had been worth it. Anna was trying and failing to hide a jealous grimace, she didn't need to look around to see that, just as she knew Matt would never see that expression on Anna's face.

"Some things are worth dying for, Matt, or at least worth waiting for. One for luck, maybe? If we survive, we can...talk...more. Now, as you Americans would say? See you in Hell" said Xenia, before stepping off of the edge and disappearing into the abyss. It was impossible to tell what happened after her head went underwater, she couldn't see, hear or breathe at all, but she knew they'd both be right behind her.

The smaller passage threw her against the walls more than once but with more speed and less force, she was never in danger of suffering anything worse than scrapes and bruises, but there seemed no end in sight. Her air seemed to run out remarkably quickly with no end in sight, so quickly that she barely had time to think about it, which with death was probably a good thing, before something impossible happened.

Something smooth and cold and flat suddenly hit her, what could only be a wall made of /metal, then she found herself sucked inside it through a massive breach. Her hair got caught in a jagged area, the snap-stretch and wrench of pain as a chunk of it was ripped out bringing tears to her eyes, before she was suddenly being catapulted through clear air. She landed hard, skidding painfully across a steel floor, crashed through a wooden table that disintegrated under the impact while knocking aside two sturdier chairs-then hit a metal door head first with a solid /THUD/ which almost knocked her out. Barely even semi-conscious, she wasn't at all aware of the state of the room she'd somehow landed in, let alone who else and what else was there.

Anna and Matt were right behind her, but Matt had passed out from lack of oxygen before they hit so Anna was the only one of three to remain fully conscious throughout. Her injuries meant that her eyesight was impaired by a dark red veil on the left side, while her head was ringing as though she'd taken a baseball bat to the back of the head followed by a sledgehammer to the lower back so hard she'd never forget it even if she walked again. Bloody, bruised and half-dead to all intents and purposes, she should have been the one who found out later from the other two what was going on after they all got out of wherever they were. Instead, it was the other way around.

As she slowly fought her way back to full awareness her senses started to function again, a deep rumbling sound announcing that her hearing was returning. However, she smelt smoke, burnt wiring, the smell of cordite-disturbingly-and, worst of all, the charnel house stink of death, rot and destruction. She could feel the heat of fires nearby.

She sat up slowly, awkwardly, then opened her eyes properly and looked around the place she'd found herself in. When she saw the truth of the place, she just screamed...

/End of Chapter Four. All Reviews welcomed./


	5. Chapter 5

For all disclaimers: see previous Chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Five

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

Thomas Walker was taking his last walk around the inside of the camp perimeter before he returned to barracks as twilight slipped up on the camp, something he always did for his peace of mind, when what looked like an entire mountain suddenly blew up almost directly in front of him maybe a mile away from his position. He was too shocked at seeing tons of rock and earth being catapulted into the air as though it was something one might witness every day to do anything more than stare even as his jaw dropped...

The shockwave hit him with such force and speed he didn't realise that he was airborne before he'd been flung half the length of the camp, not even screaming he was so shocked. He'd just begun to draw in his breath to begin screaming when he hit the far perimeter fence of the camp, stopped dead in mid-air and suddenly realised that the pressure on his chest would snap his ribs _inside_ him like twigs in _seconds_ if he was _lucky_-

The horrendous wave of sound and force ended as suddenly as it had begun and Walker hit the floor butt-first with a force which he believed would leave an imprint for life. He dimly took in startled shouts and howls of pain, the crash of falling metal, but his attention was caught and held by the mushroom cloud blast of red fire engulfed in black smoke that seemed to be going on and on. Had they just been _nuked_?! If they had, it didn't matter what anyone did now. They were all _dead_...

Suddenly, running figures passed him, racing across the base in all directions, most of them carrying weapons, some with fire-fighting gear, others still with construction tools. Then he saw his own men from the SOC among them, shovelling dirt onto an electrical fire near the base of the HQ structure, a reinforced concrete and steel box with reinforced windows-and realised he had no more time to be shocked. Time to get to work.

He forced himself upright and managed an unsteady run over to his men, grabbed a spare shovel and started shovelling dirt onto shorting electrics and the small fire they'd already started, working right beside Mark Klein and Paul Edwards. Flashing sparks being spat out by the electronics forced them to occasionally duck, but they kept at it.

Other men fought fires started by damaged equipment and what appeared to have been falling debris from the original blast, while more secured damaged structures as best they could as holes punched in steel and concrete quickly became apparent. Medics had appeared carrying stretchers and were checking everyone who had apparently been caught by the blast, several of whom were only moving feebly at best. At least two he could see weren't moving at all, a fact he was sure the Medics would be hoping meant they were "just" unconscious.

The electrical fire he and his men were fighting suddenly went out as someone managed to shut off the power, letting him look around properly. Noticing a particular fact, he did a head count and realised the guards in the towers and the perimeter guard had been doubled.

Then the general alarm went off, a deafening klaxon wail that screamed out trouble to everyone within a mile of the camp itself. It was only meant to be sounded if the camp was under immediate threat or in an emergency when all available troops were immediately to stand-to. But for it to have been sounded, an Order had to have been given specifically by the Bases CO...

A tall, thickset man stepped out of the HQ structure, grey hair and blue eyes shining even in the twilight. The mass of colour on his uniform shirt told the rest of the story. Six feet tall and solidly muscled, the ageing man looked as solid as a rock even in his late fifties, while the sharp intelligence in his eyes made sure men under his command never even tried to lie to him because he'd just _know_ if they did.

His name was Jacob Yeager, General in overall command of Marine Firebase Echo, a man whose dedication to the US army and the USA itself had never been questioned, or even doubted, in forty years of service which had gathered him every award for bravery and service the military had. The professional model for any serious soldier who wasn't a front-line savage like Neagly, he was known as a man and soldier who never, ever lost his cool and always knew _exactly_ what he was doing.

Walker had met him before and seen him work, however, so he had some familiarity with the man and his moods. From the barely-controlled glint in the General's eyes, he had no doubt that the old man was about one split hair away from loosing his temper. Of course, given the fact that the base he commanded had just suffered a heavy hit from an unknown threat who appeared to have the explosive know-how to nearly bring a mountain down on them, with no advance warning, he had good reason to be that angry. No good officer ever liked being caught off-guard like this, it exposed either a serious intelligence failure or a massive flaw in base security.

Yeager's eyes swung around, fastened on Walker himself. Walker didn't like the way that happened, he had too many secrets to _keep_ secret...

"Walker, what the Hell just hit us?" snapped Yeager, sharply. Never one to mince words either, Walker thought.

"Unknown, sir, massive explosive detonation of some kind hit us with a shockwave and flaming debris, can't tell the origin. Request permission to lead a recon mission to investigate, sir?" Walker replied.

"Granted. Get your team together and go, _now_. Understand that the blast has temporarily knocked out communications so all you'll have is contact with base until we can affect repairs. Report in every hour on the hour or you _will_ be presumed dead and a retrieval mission launched" said Yeager, then he turned and began barking orders at other soldiers.

Walker turned to the two other SOC men present, looked around, then back at the two men. "Where's Matt?" he asked, well aware that the younger man would have been the first person out to help in situations like these under normal circumstances. As he saw the expressions on the men's faces, though, he suddenly knew that he wasn't going to like the answer.

Y

"To quote Einstein: _The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance_. How are you, anyway?" Anna asked, giving the groaning Xenia a professional once over and seeing nothing worse than cuts and bruises.

Xenia, who had only just regained conscious after the recent nightmare swim, glared at Anna, gritted her teeth and shook her head to shake out the cobwebs. She spat out the mouthful of water she'd inadvertently swallowed when she'd been unexpectedly catapulted into clean air and automatically gasped for air without time to think, then sighed.

"Alive, if bruised, sodden and angry. How are _you_?" she replied, well aware that Anna was by far the most battered of the two of them from even before the swim. Not that injuries tended to have much effect on the woman, she'd be the first to admit.

All the same, Anna didn't look so good. Dried blood crusted her neck and shoulders, creeping down over her back and chest. Her hair was still slick with more and, although the bleeding was clearly considerably slowed, the back of her head was visibly still bleeding. On top of which, the woman had taken an uncontrolled tumble over a significant drop straight into a deep pool of water and been forced to swim underwater immediately after suffering significant head trauma. Despite all of that, Anna looked as fresh as she always did, the picture of health, vitality and hard-muscled strength. Madwoman, Xenia couldn't help but think.

"Nothing which won't heal up by itself. However, since I think that we might want to be gone before we all develop hypothermia we should leave this room. Now" said Anna, pointedly looking down at the floor even as she gestured at her barely-dressed body.

The water on the floor was an inch deep and rising, so chilled by passage through the mountain passes the cold cut right through to the bone. Even only just the right side of conscious Xenia had been able to feel the sting as it pooled around her seated body and hands as she braced herself upright. It occurred to her, though, that Anna was very right. They had no spare clothes, no gear or weapons, no immediate or effective way to get warm and dry. If they suffered health complications in a situation like this they were already dead.

"Couldn't agree more. What about him, though? What about _them_?" asked Xenia, sharply, glancing first at the still-unconscious Matt and then at the only other occupants of the room...

Three men, or at least they _had_ been men. One had both arms broken in so many ways the ends of broken bones stuck out of torn flesh in every direction, while a stab wound which had punched through the front of his chest, through his heart and on through the back had clearly killed him. Oddly, though, his nose had been shattered and driven up into his brain as well. Why would someone have killed him twice? Or was it deliberate overkill for some reason?

A second man had suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, several of which had struck vital organs. However again, that hadn't been the end of it. His head had been torn half free of his body, the spine clearly severed by massive application of physical force. On top of that, the top of his skull had been compressed with such force that his brain had been crushed almost physically out of his head.

The third had suffered a single gunshot wound to the head, evidently self-inflicted despite there being no evidence of a weapon-and, oddly, was the only corpse with no other injuries. Xenia hadn't seen dead bodies with such extensive injuries since the last time she'd been hired to clean up the mess after the latest killing spree by one Warlord or Dictator or another. Occasionally, she'd even been hired by the "good guys" to do the same job. The last time, come to think of it, had been in Chechnya, when soldiers of the former Red Army had gotten carried away with some villagers who'd objected to their women being "borrowed" by the soldiers...

"_They_ can lie there and rot, I couldn't care less. Dead is dead. Him, though? Well, let me try something..." said Anna, before she knelt down next to Matt and whispered something in his ear Xenia couldn't make out even as she stood up, careful to be sure that her legs took her weight-

Matt's eyes shot open and he exploded to his feet so suddenly Xenia thought he was going to keep going up and bounce off of the roof before he stopped, only he was suddenly standing so still he could have been standing at attention on a parade ground. It took a long moment, just long enough for Xenia to blink, then he breathed in deeply and relaxed, looking at Anna with a half smile she returned with a full, easy one.

"Anna, did you _really_ need to do that to wake me up?" he asked, dryly, clearly well aware of what the answer would be. The smile on Anna's face just grew broader.

"Knock it off, the pair of you...alright, we need to get out of this room, da? I need options" said Xenia, staring around the room to take in what there was to be seen.

Seven feet tall, ten wide and twenty long, grey metal walls and door-electronically locked, based on what she could see. The room was filled with storage cupboards, also made of metal, plastic tables and what looked like scientific equipment of some sort, test tubes, beakers? Plastic stools were the only other things contained in the room apart from the dead bodies.

Problems immediately occurred, though. Something catastrophic had clearly occurred here, very recently. The metal walls were deformed and bent into shapes that nature could never have defined and the door had been blasted partially inwards at the bottom. Whatever had done the damage had forced enough excess from the blast inside what was evidently a combined lab and storage room to throw heavy cabinets around the room as though they were children's toys which didn't weigh a quarter-ton each. Some freak twist of the blast had gone on past that to tear a huge piece of wall away from the stone it had backed onto, which had opened the way in for them.

The room was barely lit with flickering pale white electrical lights, several of which had been damaged or were simply no longer there. The result was what she referred to as the "Haunted House" effect, when at best you could see a little of what was going on and, more than likely, what you could tell was there but couldn't see was far worse than what was in front of your eyes. In these circumstances, shadows could kill. They were already veering towards "Worst Case Scenario" in her mind...

"Powers down, so we'll have to force the door. No guns, gear or even clothes, none to be had from those bodies, so we'll be walking the unknown pretty much naked and unarmed. The other option is to sit here and slowly freeze to death. What have I missed" asked Matt, already striding over to the door.

"Look through the gap to see what's outside before we open the door and maybe you'll find out. Exercise all due caution, though, we don't know what the Hell's going on here nor who's causing or caused what" replied Xenia, striding over to the door herself even as Matt, who was clearly under no illusions over who was the muscle, braced himself against the damaged section.

"You know, Xenia, between us all I suspect that we have about thirty-five years of bloodshed experience in some of the worst situations on earth to hand. We don't need Orders, save them for the greens" said Anna, sharply.

"If I'm not simply vocalising what were all thinking, Anna, I'll dance through these halls naked singing the Russian national anthem. Now some quiet, please" said Xenia, keeling down to get a good look at what lay beyond. She didn't like what she saw.

Metal-sheathed corridors extended left, right and directly in front of the door, as far as she could see. The corridor to the left had two doors she could see on the right hand side, while the central corridor was blank until it reached what appeared to be fractured glass walls and double doors at the far end. She couldn't really see anything to the right, but that was because there were several small fires visible that were letting off enough smoke to obscure her view down the corridor.

Fire damage was evident everywhere, in fact, streaking ceiling, walls and floors. Bent and twisted areas of metal reflected the damage that had clearly been caused when the explosion had occurred, whatever the cause. Worse was the torn-up roof, shattered lights still flickering on and off, from which still-live electrical cables, wiring and jagged edges of metal and plastic hung. The floor was buckled, bent and scorched, but the structure itself seemed solid enough to move around in.

What had happened here? Had somebody bombed what looked like an underground complex from the outside? Or from the inside, as looked more probable? If so, where were all of the bodies there should have been if this place evidently wasn't abandoned, as the bodies in the room suggested? If a structure like this had been bombed but retained some kind of electrical power, what kind of source was it drawing from? Could they be dealing with a reactor of some kind?

Ultimately, though, unless they could find a way out none of that mattered. She knew the signs of combat when she saw them. This place had seen combat, very recently. If even just survivors from either side were still present? Good as any single soldier was, anyone trying to kill them only had to be lucky _once_...

"It's clear, lets pry this thing open and get out. Matt, ready on 3, 2, 1...NOW!" snapped Xenia, bracing her feet and wrenching up and back at the damaged area with all of the considerable power of her long body. Matt did the same, with Anna right beside him-and, after just a few seconds resistance, the damaged metal bent half out of the track of the doorway with a protesting scream, easily opening to the point that a human being on his or her knees could fit through.

Xenia went through first, followed by Anna and then Matt. Once outside they all stood up straight, stopped and looked around to take in the scene.

"What happened here? It looks like there was a fireball blast combined with a big explosion recently, but there's no sign of the kind of debris I'd associate with a bomb" asked Matt.

"To quote my old instructor, six months training in handling explosives just teaches you how to blow yourself up. For all we know the blast vaporised the bomb itself, Matt, or the explosion was more powerful than it was supposed to be and scattered the casing in pieces so small we just can't see them. None of us are experts, we can guess until doomsday and not know. Better we get out of here and worry about it later" replied Anna.

"I'm with Anna on this one, Matt. Something very bad happened here recently and this place looks far too modern for it to have been from faulty wiring. I don't think we want to be here when whatever caused this comes back. More to the point, the lack of bodies disturbs me. If this place has been evacuated, why would someone try to blow it up? If not, what's happened to everyone? Why _wouldn't_ a blast designed to destroy the facility have done so? I hope that this _is_ a Terrorist training area, because I'm starting to think that were in a Black Box facility" said Xenia, at which Anna shot her a sharp look and Matt shook his head.

"No, no way, there would be guards and staff everywhere if this was a Black facility. We'd already be in jail or suffering Amnesia. Besides, they don't make those kinds of mistakes" said Matt, shaking his head.

"Should I point out now I could given you half a dozen examples from the time the USSR was still a real power in the world, Matt? The KGB was more brutal, ruthless and thorough than any of your security organisations and _it_ couldn't erase even the possibility of mistakes completely. It's American arrogance to think that _you_ can, nothing else" replied Xenia, pointedly.

Matt's eyes flashed, but a warning look from Anna saw him force himself to calm down. Given the odd expression on her face, though, Xenia wasn't sure whether or not Anna agreed with her or held a different opinion altogether.

"Where are we going first, anyway?" asked Anna, loudly, to break the silence that had descended. It didn't quite work.

"Now there's a question..." muttered Xenia, almost wishing that she had a coin to toss-not that coins came with three sides, of course...

Y

In Marine Fire Base Echo, events were accelerating. Troops were gathered in combat formations and moving out of the base at a jog to set up a hard perimeter around the entire area until communications could be restored, heavy weapons were being brought out of the armoury to reinforce the perimeter of the camp itself and combat engineers were already hard at work. Damaged electrical circuits had already been repaired or replaced, plates of steel were being welded into place over damaged areas of metal structures and cement was being used to seal holes in other buildings.

Atop the HQ building, though, Walker couldn't help but notice no less than three engineers all clearly having trouble with the buckled satellite dish and damaged antenna. Being higher than almost anything else around the camp, the communications array had taken the most damage as well. He wondered, in fact, whether or not they'd have to replace rather than repair it...

He glanced around at his men, who were equipped and ready ten minutes after the event, of course. Weapons locked and loaded, gear and body armour in place, all they needed was the go Order. When they found him-if he was even still alive-he'd have words with Matt about leaving his own men with no more idea about where he was going than "Out of contact for at least an hour off-base".

Xenia? If she was in pieces somewhere he'd suffer from nothing worse than a sense of extreme satisfaction, the bitch deserved nothing better, probably worse. After she'd humiliated him in front of the entire Special Operations Command structure during his very first briefing when he was still fresh on the ground? Dared to state that he was inexperienced where Wetworks were concerned? Warned that they needed an experienced hand-i.e. Her, he'd realised at the time-planning the missions? Even gone so far as to warn that just knowing the maps wasn't enough in a country like Afghanistan, one had to see and experience the place before one could even begin to understand it?! She'd _dared_ to bring up the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which had failed to crush guerrilla resistance despite flooding the country with millions of soldiers and tons of heavy equipment?!? A resistance everyone knew had been backed up by the CIA and US Military?!

She deserved a slow, painful, lingering death for even suggesting indirectly that there was any comparison between the modern, well-equipped and highly trained US troops now in-country and the ramshackle, disorganised and barely-trained rabble equipped with outdated equipment scavenged from vehicles and weapons going back to the Second World War _her_ country had deployed. For her insults against _him_, personally? He would have had her gang-raped and boiled alive at the very least if they'd been anywhere near a form of civilisation where he could call a "friend".

Anna? He'd use drugs if he had to, a woman that beautiful didn't need a mind of her own anyway. With a body like hers she was born and built to pleasure men, particularly wealthy and powerful men like him-or at least that would be the case once his plan came to fruition. The stupid bitch just didn't want to admit it, but he knew people who could fix that...

He paused as he heard the faintest trace of an echo on the wind, a suggestion of sound which shouldn't have been there even over the racket of on-going engineering work. It was almost impossible for him to pin down the source or the nature of what had alerted him, his instincts more than his hearing had alerted him, but he'd seen and experienced more than enough in the way of "silent" work over the years to be sure that, whatever it was, it wasn't a natural sound.

Klein went to speak, but Walker irritably hushed him with a gesture. There it was _again_, a dull rumble that no natural movement could cause. He knew what _could_, though: a very low-flying fast-attack helicopter. He'd been on more than one Op where the slaughter had finished the fight before it began because nobody saw the attackers coming. That had been since they came from the sky and at such a speed that by the time the defenders realised the attackers were shooting at them from above and _inside_ the defensive circle, it was all over. He wasn't, _wouldn't_ be going out like that.

All the same, something was...well, _off_. He could only make out _one_ approaching echo and, while basic, Echo Base had anti-air defences. Short of a Suicide attack, no single aircraft would do any real damage to the base. Klein and Edwards could hear it now, too, he could tell, from the way they were both frowning and looking around themselves, as though they could hear something but weren't sure what, like him. If all else went to Hell, at least he could still use the men in full SOC body armour as cover-

Suddenly a jet-black Stealth helicopter shot out of the mouth of a valley just over a mile away, startled shouts rising immediately, heading straight for the camp. Calls for Orders went up even as anti-air gun crews brought weapons to bear and aimed, ready to shoot, but General Yeager's hard voice overrode everyone's and nobody fired as the helicopter slowed to a sudden halt just fifty metres from the base perimeter wall.

Given a better look, even as the choppers side door swung open, Walker noticed that the aircraft had absolutely no identifying markings, which had to have been what had caused Yeager's hold Order. Special Forces often rode around in unmarked vehicles as a security measure, with the hills and valleys often literally crawling with any number of fanatics and terrorists who believed they would receive their reward in Paradise as long as they died slaughtering the enemies of their God. Most of the time, it worked-but not all of the time

Walker personally believed that anyone mad enough to believe in God in the kind of world they lived in should be executed for the good of the species. Terrorist believers deserved to be taught the true nature of Hell _before_ they died submerged in molten lava, at the very least, just so they understood where they were really going to end up if there was some kind of "After" when one died. Of course, thanks to an old and very special friendship, he'd known there were _literally_ fates worse than death available for close to twenty years now...

A tall, slim figure with an athletic build which was too muscular to be a woman's eased himself down a rope he'd tossed from the helicopters side. Thick brown hair carefully shaped around his head, he was smooth-faced with hazel eyes, young-mid-twenties at most-and solidly built. He moved with an easy grace and speed which had extensive training and highly-developed martial arts skills added to natural talent to Walkers eyes.

Dressed all in black, a t-shirt, jeans, solid looking boots, he had a pistol rig strapped across his chest with a heavy pistol-a .45 apparently-snug under his left armpit. What looked like a Backup weapon was almost concealed at the base of his spine under his t-shirt, while Walker could see twin combat knives sheathed on the outside of his boots, one to a boot. A closer inspection revealed that he was wearing a sleeveless bulletproof vest over his t-shirt and, over that, combat webbing with various sealed pockets.

His lack of the deep tan that always existed on Veterans told Walker the young man wasn't stationed in country, but told him nothing about the man himself. That sort of fact was a result he _never_ liked.

The man jogged over to the main gate without apparent worry once he touched the ground, seemingly not bothered by the dozens of guns aimed at him. He showed the gate guards some wallet-sized ID-and suddenly the guard called out for General Yeager. Yeager hurried over, checked the mans ID himself, then beckoned Walker over.

"Walker, this man is going into the base with you, no arguments. Get up there" snapped Yeager, sharply.

"Sir? This man is a civilian, surely. Might I ask why he is being included on a Military mission?" asked Walker, not needing yet another pair of eyes to watch out for.

"He _is_ included because his authority here and Orders come down directly from the White House, the President in fact. Any _more_ questions, soldier?" asked Yeager, pointedly.

"By the way, I'm Leon S. Kennedy. Good to meet you, Mr. Walker" said Leon, reaching out and shaking Walkers hand with a firm, strong grip despite his piano-players soft hands.

Walker could only hope that he'd kept every trace of what he was thinking and feeling out of his eyes and off of his face when he heard the young man's name. Leon S. Kennedy, rookie cop in 1998, survivor of Racoon City. Now, reportedly, part of some above-Top-Secret unit dedicated exclusively to dealing with Bio-War attacks and events, answering only to the President. What Walker's information suggested to him was that Leon was possibly that units top Agent...

His job had just gotten ten times more complicated. Things were getting more dangerous for him every time he turned around...

Y

The ringing in her ears had finally stopped, the floor had ceased to move without her consent and she could actually breathe normally once more. That was a start, although barely an improvement.

A thin layer of ash covered the faceplate of her combat helmet, so she raised a hand to brush it off. The effort was only partially successful, some smearing occurring as her gloved fingers pressed down too hard, but at least she could see a little. What she could see, however, did nothing to improve her headache, the after-effect of being caught up in the initial explosion to begin with.

Gleaming red light still flickered intermittently, the remaining visual warning signs of the Self-Destruct having been armed. She could still dully hear the faint beeping of computer alarms going off from nearby, what had to be the main computer console. That she wasn't dead was remarkable in and of itself. What came next, though? She wasn't sure whether or not it would be an improvement on what could have been.

She checked her arms and legs, hands and feet, eyes, every part of her body. All intact and functional, if sore with bruising. Her hearing appeared to be impaired, as well, she was picking up on sounds she should have noticed immediately after minutes. That it was most likely the result of massive air pressure changes nearly blasting in her eardrums didn't help, since she had no way of telling how bad the damage was or if she would, or even _could_ recover.

Didn't matter, for now at least. If she couldn't rely on her ears to tell her what was happening around her, she'd just have to rely on her eyes. On that basis, it was time she stopped playing dead and got back to work. If there was any way left to retrieve her mission objective from this clusterfuck meltdown, she could only have a limited amount of time to do it at best.

The heels of her boots skidded momentarily on the damaged steel floor, but she compensated by placing both hands down on the floor and pushing up, raising her upper body and lowering her centre of gravity so that her own body weight gave her more traction. Her boots caught and she got her feet flat on the floor, rose upright and looked around her as best she could.

The control room for the underground base had only been six and a half feet tall, eight wide and long in good condition. One end had contained the security seal reinforced steel doors, which were still shut. The other had been filled with every kind of computer equipment, monitor screens-and a gun locker, for emergencies.

By Umbrella standards the base was actually austere, small at half a mile square-but that didn't take away from the importance of the work they'd been doing in it. Work that she was _supposed_ to have been stealing from them with her team...

Now the doors were blackened from a fireball blast that should have incinerated her, pock-marked and dented from the explosion that should have brought down the roof, or possibly blown out the doors and smashed her flat against them in the process. The steel on the walls looked as though it had been hit by an earthquake, bent and distorted in ways that defied the human eye and even the imagination, while the ceiling was simply shredded, fragments of steel and even bits of rock lying all over the place. The floor was simply a huge dent, as though it had been struck by a sledgehammer wielded by the Devil himself trying to tear a hole down into Hell.

The computers and other gear were a slagged, shattered mess sprayed around and about the room like metal confetti mixed with glass fragments and bits of plastic from too many sources to count. Only the dim remnants of the Self-Destruct warning lights provided any light at all, flickering on and off as they were. Which reminded her, if the Self-Destruct _had_ gone off, why wasn't she _dead_?

She knew Umbrella and its security arrangements better than almost anyone, she'd even worked for the company for a while years back, so she was absolutely sure the entire structure would have been rigged to be sterilised by incendiary charges even as explosives blew out all of the supports. The structure would simply have been obliterated, no traces of man or machine left behind, let alone data. So, again, why wasn't she _dead_?

Even as her brain caught up with the fact that without power to run either the air-conditioning or open the doors she was as good as trapped in an underground tomb where she was going to suffocate where no one would hear her scream, literally, she spotted something odd. Something that shouldn't have been possible.

A flickering green light, on one of the seemingly shattered computer screens which was still roughly in one piece, was glowing. That could only mean that the screen itself was still active, which could mean that she had central network access. Was it possible...?

She made her way over to it carefully, moving aside the debris, ignoring the scorch mark where the Security Chief for the base had blown himself up. Finding an operational keyboard to attach to the computer safely proved a challenge, but she was up to it. When the computer displayed a prompt, she tapped in the dead head Scientists details and Password and entered them. She was granted access, so she decided to see what she could do from her position first of all.

_**ACCESS: Granted. Welcome, Researcher Philips.**_

_:System status?_

_**WARNING**__**System interrupt**__**WARNING**_

_Self-Destruct system ACTIVE._

_**Countdown COMPLETE.**_

_**WARNING**__** System failure/interrupt-source identified, INTERNAL.**_

_**PATRIARCH program initiated.**_

_**Self-Destruct ABORT.**_

_**System RESET.**_

_:Query PATRIARCH program?_

_**PATRIARCH program RESTRICTED. Access Lv.10+ Clearance ONLY.**_

_:Query Security systems?_

_**LOCKDOWN. Breach detected main storage/lab four. CCTV/Monitoring systems estimate 85 percent DESTROYED 9 percent DISABLED. H/K systems 75 percent DESTROYED-SYSTEM ACTIVE.**_

_**WARNING**__** System interrupt **__**WARNING**_

_CORE BREACH DETECTED. Safety system protocols COMPROMISED, estimate 45 percent efficiency. Time to total systems failure/Core destruction:_

_**35.46.05**_

_:Initiate Emergency Reactor shutdown procedure. Code Triple RED._

_Command DISALLOWED. SYSTEMS FAILURE._

_**Manual Override REQUIRED.**_

_**35:39:43**_

_:REROUTE-to motive work systems and air circulation. Shut down ALL non-vital systems Code Triple RED._

**PATRIARCH program Override authority Lv.12 Clearance. Emergency redirect to communication systems/computer download 50 percent power output AT ALL TIMES.**

_**Working...Task completed. Motive systems and air circulation systems RESTORED.**_

_**33:42:12**_

_:Verbalise system reports. Log Off._

**Task completed.**

Standing there, still as death itself in the sudden gloom, the young woman reached into a belt pouch and withdrew a small but powerful flashlight. The light snapped on and reflected from hundreds of shards of shattered glass, illuminating the room somewhat once again and letting her get a good look at herself.

Steel-grey boots, leggings, shirt and gloves, helmet with one-way gleaming visor, all state of the art body armour. Belt with various pouches, pouches set in her leggings that held spare ammunition and other surprises. On her right hip a long knife was securely sheathed, while on the floor lay an automatic rifle loaded with hollow-points which she'd dropped when the explosion had occurred as she'd dived frantically for cover.

She could still hear the Security Chiefs last words, spoken just before she'd shot him in the head and he'd fallen over backwards, a dying wrench ripping open his shirt to reveal to her horrified eyes the explosive suicide bomber belt he'd been wearing. She suspected she'd be able to hear them for the rest of her life.

"_I'll wait for you in Hell, bitch, the companies better there!_"

She swore, something she rarely did, then reached up and almost wrenched her helmet off, the sudden surge of air letting her feel the hum of air conditioning on her face and pushing through her hair, letting her hear the electronic buzz of the door systems now working again. She closed her eyes for a moment, to clear her head, then opened them again and sighed.

She would not be left responsible for nuking Afghanistan, not when it could be prevented, even thought the fault was really Umbrella's in building a facility powered by a small nuclear reactor in the first place. One kiloton or ten kilotons, the destruction would still be absolute in the affected area, the casualties beyond her ability to understand, let alone take in, even out in the wilds like this. Worse, if the US Military base nearby got taken out by an apparent nuclear strike? The USA would have the only excuse it needed to start nuking even suspected Al'Quaeda strongholds and bases.

Her maternal grandfather had been in Hiroshima in 1945 as a young conscript when the nuclear bomb dropped by the Americans on the city had gone off. At first entranced by the intense flash of light, he'd realised too late that it was a bomb of a kind the world had never seen before-and the last thing he'd ever seen had been a mushroom cloud that had destroyed the whole of the world he knew in less time than it took to say. The flash had burnt his eyes out of his skull entirely, but his last sight had been the detonation itself. He'd never talked about it afterwards, not even how he'd survived, except to say that he'd looked through the gates of Hell itself that day-and knew something was smiling back.

In the dim light, short-cut black hair and brown slightly slanted eyes shone in a smooth face. She looked angry, to her own eyes, very angry, with good reason. She'd made her grandfather a promise, decades earlier, that she would never, ever walk away from a situation where what had happened to her could ever, even possibly, happen to anyone else. To save her own life, she'd been forced to break an oath to the only father figure she'd ever really had and ended up left unable to do anything but stand and watch, weeping, as the nuke killed almost a hundred thousand people.

She'd been so close to the explosion that she'd been left physically scarred by it, on top of her other injuries, but she knew a superb Doctor who never asked questions for the right compensation and Plastic Surgery had removed the scars-on the outside. On the inside? A very different matter. If Trent hadn't managed to track her down before she'd finally recovered her memory following her Breakdown after Racoon City and explain what he had in mind, clearly well aware of what the catastrophe had truly meant to her?

People would be dead. A lot of people. At her worst, she was capable of anything and she was...close...to someone who could literally do anything she put her mind to. Between the two of them, unless Wesker himself with his G-Virus enhancements got in the way, she knew that she and Giselle could have brought Umbrella down themselves. Trent's intentions, however, were so much more interesting...

Enough was enough. Her name was Ada Wong, she had a job to do and a bomb to stop. It was time to get to work...

/End of Part Five. All Reviews welcomed/.


	6. Chapter 6

For all disclaimers: See previous Chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Six

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

Walker and his team were heading towards the site of the explosion at a steady quick-march, Leon Kennedy right beside them, shadowed by Delta's in case they needed backup in a hurry, but Walker still couldn't quite get his head around why on Earth Leon Kennedy would have arrived at the base so soon after the explosion. He didn't like that, not at all.

He didn't know that many of Umbrella's secrets himself, he wasn't fool enough to think that much trust existed between himself and Spencer while he was still nominally SOC field Commander and not working full-time for Umbrella, but... He _did_ know that there were small-scale Umbrella research bases scattered around remote parts of the country, in secure areas provided by the Taleban as a result of Umbrella's providing them with certain..._luxuries_ they had no other way of gaining. The fact that Al'Quaeda had put in a good word for Umbrella hadn't hurt, either.

Terrorists were gold mines for the trial and distribution of Umbrella's biological and chemical weapons, anyone who hadn't realised that simply wasn't smart enough to understand the facts. Fanatics like Al'Quaeda was made up of didn't care if they died themselves as long as they achieved their aim of killing as many people as possible before they could be found and stopped and, true to form, this also meant that they didn't care at all just what kind of weaponry they used to achieve this end.

Walker didn't care himself, he was well aware that the CIA had used a similar strategy when aiding armed resistance movements against Communist Governments or sympathisers during the Cold War. So as far as he was concerned, nobody in the US could tell he with real authority whether what he was doing was "Right" or "Wrong". All he was doing was making himself rich, which was the dream of all Americans in the end, wasn't it?

That was what made Kennedy so dangerous, though. He'd fought his way right through Racoon City as a rookie Cop on his first day after arriving when the Outbreak was already well underway. He'd fought past hordes of Zombies, Mutants and The "Mr. X" Tyrant that had been sent into Racoon to retrieve William Birkin's G-Virus sample. He'd defeated every trap and puzzle thrown at him and even somehow managed to get the better of Ada Wong, a professional Spy and Assassin for hire who remained one of the coldest fish Walker had ever met. That she was also easily one of the most effective Agents in her profession wasn't lost on him. On top of all of that, Leon Kennedy had gone on to not only escape the city but also find a way to destroy the G-Virus mutated Birkin before that monster could escape himself.

Yes, he'd had help from Claire Redfield, Chris Redfield's sister, who'd been dragging around after her Birkin's brat of a daughter, but Walker knew the type and had no doubt that Kennedy would have been first in and last out given any situation which involved risk. The former Cop was the kind of man who'd jump in front of a bus to save a child even if meant his own death-and that made him capable of anything if lives he regarded as innocent were at risk.

Leon Kennedy was a survivor, yes, but he was also a killer of the highest order, nobody incapable of cold-blooded Murder could have survived Racoon. A man like that was a man who you pissed off only if your own life didn't have much meaning to you.

"So why is a White House Agent along for the ride here, Kennedy? Are you supposed to make sure that we don't see anything we shouldn't?" asked Walker, trying to see if he could draw the younger man out and get him talking.

Kennedy just smiled at Walkers comment, a look Walker couldn't identify in his eyes. When he looked up and over directly at Walker, the older man couldn't meet his eyes. Kennedy had eyes which could cut, on top of which he had a thousand yard stare which would have made madmen look away.

"It's what you _will_ see you should be worried about" Kennedy replied, softly. Behind them, Mark Klein and Paul Edwards shared a worried look...

Y

"This glass is shatterproof, the explosion smashed it to pieces and its still in the frame. Do you really think we can get through it despite that?" asked Anna, gently pushing against the glass with the fingers of both hands, clearly suspecting she'd slice her hands open on the shattered glass if she pushed too hard too close.

"We have to get out of here somehow and I think we have a better chance here than running through fire and hoping for the best. The electrical system is shot to Hell in here or I'd have tried the doors first, but we can't guarantee they won't short out and kill one of us then stay shut for good under the circumstances. If you have any ideas of your own, feel free to share" replied Xenia, scraping at the glass with a large, sharp shard of metal she'd recovered from the floor.

"I do. Duck" replied Matt, from behind them both, as they both suddenly realised he was running towards them...

Anna went left, Xenia right, flattening themselves against the wall as Matt charged the entrance door with a jagged edge of metal the size of a spades blade. Despite the short running distance he managed to reach an impressive speed, but at the last moment he snapped the metal shard behind his back and then threw it at the door, edge-first, as hard as he could, dropping to the floor and rolling over and over as he did to burn off his momentum as fast as he could.

The big metal shard slashed through the air for less than five seconds before it crashed, hard, into the already shattered glass door. Already almost destroyed, the shattered glass plates of the door couldn't withstand the massive impact and the glass exploded into the room beyond like a hail of destroyed mirrors. Oddly, though, there was little in the way of impact sound, as though something soft was cushioning the impact.

"Well, that works. Good work, Matt" said Anna, walking over to him and almost lifting him back to his feet one-handed as he took her hand and abruptly came to his feet.

"Don't speak too soon about this being a good idea, Anna. Not until you've seen this" replied Xenia, looking straight through the shattered door into the room beyond.

It was an office area of sorts, Xenia supposed, with cubicles separated by grey steel walls, a computer, desk and filing cabinet being in each cubicle. The roof was a light cream colour, relaxing to the eyes in the long-term presumably, with the remnants of fluorescent lights still illuminating the scene somewhat, illuminating a slim carpet of an earthy brown colour. That, though, was where any appearance of normality ended.

Twenty people had been in the room when whatever had happened had-and not one of them had left alive. She knew this for a fact because not one of them had left their seats, some of them leaning forwards as though asleep, some with heads thrown back with grotesque expressions of enquiry still on their faces, as though they hadn't understood what was going on. Some were even lying down on the ground, as though they'd just decided to lie down and take a nap.

Only one seemed odd, a young man who had seemingly bent forwards so suddenly that his face had smashed through his computers screen and gotten stuck there, blood still dripping down what was left of his face and off of his chin onto his computer and then onto his desk. Although "odd" was relative in a situation like this, she couldn't help but think.

After all, she didn't need to be a Medic to be well aware that none of the people were breathing. She didn't even need to take a second look to be sure that not one of them had died as a result of violent assault, that this had been done by something much worse.

"Gas, it has to be, nothing else could kill so many people so quickly without making them at least try to fight it. Are we safe even standing here?" asked Matt, standing at the very edge of the doorway.

"To do this I'd guess at heavy-dosage Knockout gas which literally put these people to sleep for good. If there was enough of it left to affect us at dosages that could do this, we'd be unconscious or dead already. We're safe, what worries me is who the Hell goes to this much trouble to prevent hostages being taken. These people were gassed, the Security guards fought to the death or committed Suicide. Is anyone else seeing a pattern here?" asked Xenia, pointedly.

"Just the kind where the only Plan is "No-one here gets out alive" I suspect. If everyone's dead, though, why aren't we finding bodies in the corridors? Did the people who attacked this place police the dead?" asked Anna.

"That we can worry about when were not soaking wet, half naked and unarmed in an unknown facility which is clearly hostile. Lets get in here" said Xenia, reaching through the shattered glass to find and release the Emergency bolt lock that shut when, clearly, a Lockdown was sounded. The door hissed open and she stepped inside.

"Alright, find your sizes and take what you need. Anything useful, take that to" said Xenia, heading straight for a middle-aged woman who, while evidently shorter than her own six foot, had a physique similar enough that she was sure the clothes would at least be a close fit.

"Hold on, these people are _dead_. We can't just-" began Matt, but Anna cut him off.

"Matt, get this through your head. These people are dead and gone, they no longer own possessions, care about their dignity nor about any secrets they may have had. They are going to rot away down here because nobody cares and we can't carry them out ourselves, if they aren't incinerated when whatever was supposed to destroy this place finally clears whatever malfunction it's suffered and finishes the job. If you have a problem wearing the clothes of the dead you should stop wearing clothes, anyway, or don't you know how many animals die each week just so that we can wear comfortable shoes, let alone the rest of it? Get over yourself, Matt" Anna snapped, before following Xenia's lead.

"It's not right..." Matt muttered, before forcing himself to move forwards and start taking the clothes off of a man who looked the right size. He felt revolted as he did so, but he knew he had no choice.

Xenia ended up with a sky-blue tight shirt, black trousers and a pair of dark-brown heavy shoes which looked designed to inflict pain and cause loud noises. Anna found a white t-shirt and dark-blue jeans, added to a grey pair of trainers. Xenia and Matt made a point of not staring at the t-shirt, which read "_I'm laughing because they haven't found the bodies yet_" in large bold print, just in case. Matt found himself a pair of black shoes with steel toe caps, but ended up dressed like an Undertaker because the black suit and white shirt of the man who had evidently been the office manager was the only well-fitting set of clothes he could find.

Just to make a point, he didn't include the black tie as part of his outfit. But he actually found himself blushing when he noticed both Xenia and Anna taking care to get a good look.

"Isn't that illegal, Xenia? A man who looks just as tasty dressed up as undressed?" asked Anna.

"Oh, there are always exceptions to the rule, niet?" replied Xenia, well aware Matt was refusing to meet the eyes of either of them. She also noticed that his blush was slowly but surely turning his face crimson-was the boy really that naïve? No, she suspected not. He struck her as a man uncomfortable with compliments from other women when he was committed to one in particular. He was embarrassed, not flattered. A shame, in her opinion. The fun they could have had together...

A search for weapons didn't turn up much. Xenia found a Swiss Army knife with razor-sharp blades while Matt discovered hairspray and a lighter, which he backed up with a silver letter-opener forged in the shape of a short-sword. Anna took a more direct approach, shattered one of the few wooden chairs in the room and tore loose two legs to use as Nunchunkas. Xenia had seen Anna fight, she didn't need to imagine the kind of devastation the woman could do even with only a pair of wooden sticks in her hands if she had to.

"Right then, where do we go next..." Anna began, but her voice trailed off as a humming noise that had been barely audible before suddenly increased in volume. Anna's long hair immediately started to shift as though it was being pushed and pulled around by drafts of wind-and, a second later, she realised that was exactly what was happening.

"The Air Conditioning is back up to speed. Someone must be in the control room for this place playing around" said Xenia, softly, before a dull thump sounded from the direction of the corridor.

"Was that the electronic locks all releasing at once, do you think?" asked Anna, just as quietly. Xenia just nodded as Matt glanced around at the room, clearly wondering what was going to happen next.

"I just hope that it's a good thing" Anna added, a second before a sound echoed from somewhere nearby, the kind of sound that made grown men weep. The awful screech of tearing metal and human agony combined, before a sickening clang combined with a crunch of what could only be snapping bone and pulverised flesh followed a second later.

"It's not" said Matt, pointedly. "Unless you consider horrific death as a good way to go if I'm any judge" he added, staring straight at the door, hairspray and lighter in hand and ready as he faced the doorway head on.

"Might I just say thank you for that contribution, Matt? More to the point, this gets worse" replied Xenia, gesturing him and Anna over to where she was seated by a computer. In answer to their questioning looks, she just pointed at the screen. "This one's still working" she added...

Matt and Anna saw the screensaver symbol at the same time, but Matt blinked where Anna's eyes narrowed sharply. Red and white, twelve-sided, flat, spinning around and around on a computer screen? It was the symbol of Umbrella Corporation, they all knew it.

"What the _**Hell**_-?!" Matt began, but the expression on Xenia's face stopped him from saying anything else. Then Anna deactivated the screensaver and he realised why.

_**WARNING**__**System interrupt**__**WARNING**_

_CORE BREACH DETECTED. Safety systems protocols COMPROMISED, estimate 40 percent efficiency. Time to total systems failure/Core destruction:_

_**30:09:07**_

_All staff EVACUATE. Self-Destruct INITIATED._

_PATRIARCH program running._

"I knew we hadn't had enough fun yet... This says there's a nuclear reactor hidden under this facility, do you realise that? Even if we get outside in less than half an hour we'd need a jet to get far enough away in time when it goes up" said Anna, with a sigh of something between frustration and worry.

"Patriarch...? Isn't that the new AI program designed to manage data flow and maintain electronic records?" asked Xenia, aloud.

"Yes, which makes me think that whatever was being worked on here, Umbrella Corporation-if that's who built and ran this place-didn't care about the people but does care about the data. Bet you that's why all of the people in this room died so quickly" replied Anna.

"I think I'm going to throw up..." muttered Matt, just loud enough for the others to hear him. They both turned and glared at him, but at least he'd managed to stop them from discussing Doomsday situations for the moment while they were in the middle of the nightmare...

Y

After several reroutes, a work-around applied to the circuits controlling the door and a little luck added to a lot of skill, Ada Wong had finally managed to get the control room door open. Now what she had to do was twofold and simple: she had to finish her teams data-grab mission before the Patriarch program finished downloading all of the data from the complex computers and went on to complete the job by blowing every system in the complex. Also, she had to stop a nuclear reactor from blowing up when its safeties finally failed.

Thinking that, she started to run. She didn't have _any_ time to waste.

/End of Part Six. All Reviews welcomed/.


	7. Chapter 7

For all disclaimers: see earlier Chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Seven

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

"I might as well be armed with a pair of tweezers..." muttered Xenia, as they advanced back into the main corridor slowly and carefully. The small Swiss army knife in her hand was better than nothing, but only just...

"You can laugh? I feel like I should be playing the drums with these sticks, not fighting armed hostiles with automatic weapons if it comes to that" snapped Anna.

"Is it even worth pointing out that most men I've ever met would pause for a moment before shooting either of you? Just think about why" said Matt, dryly. Both women stopped moving and turned sharply to glare at him, but he noticed a smirk on Xenia's face.

"Thanks for that, I'll be sure to go into the next room naked just in case. In the meantime, can we discuss the reason that the symbol of Umbrella Corporation was on that computer screen?" replied Anna, testily.

"Umbrella may specialise in corporate Espionage, I should know, but lets not be naïve and pretend Racoon City didn't happen back in '98. We've all heard the rumours unless we've been asleep for the past two years and change? About the dead walking the streets, Mutants and monsters eating people, Umbrella trying to Cover everything up by throwing money at the press and Lawyers to spin and deny everything? I've seen the footage that got smuggled out by Terri Morales, haven't you? If that was all faked I'm the Tsar of Russia" said Xenia, even as she led them around the corner, spinning sharply around the corner with weapon held high and ready before nodding to confirm it was clear.

"I've seen it too, but I still don't get how they could have done it, no matter what that Abernathy woman said. You can't just "reactivate" a human mind and body like it's got an on/off switch. That's like saying there's a spinning door between life and death you can open if you want to" replied Matt. He didn't want to believe it, but SOC Analysts had verified the footage again and again to be sure. There was no question, it was the real thing...

"You're missing the point, Matt. These people weren't raised from the dead, whatever the Hell that means, they were _dead_, that simple. My understanding of what Abernathy said is that Umbrella discovered some kind of Virus which could use the electricity left over in the brain to reactivate the basics _in_ the brain and get a corpse upright under its own power, completely mindless, with nothing but the need to feed existent. Wounds caused by these things to the living passed on the infection and created more. The ultimate biological weapon, that's what I'd call things like that. Wouldn't you?" asked Anna, pointedly.

"Point" replied Matt, after a long moment, having honestly not thought of it that way before. Thinking of it that way made him wonder just what else Umbrella could have been working on that could have gotten loose in the catastrophe that Racoon City had become before the end...

"Everyone shut up" said Xenia abruptly, as she spotted a dark shadow on the inside of the far door, which had clearly opened slightly due to weight pressed against it from the other side. The dark shadow was too dense to have been caused by anything less than a body, more to the point a body that was so still _only_ death could have been the cause. If Umbrella _could_ effectively raise the dead-she knew that they could, but that was another story she had no intention of getting into-they weren't safe even in a facility where it appeared everyone had already been killed, one way or another.

She walked slowly and carefully over to the door with measured strides, got her fingertips between the door and its frame-then stepped away sharply and heaved it open. She had to jump backwards to dodge what fell out even as the door swung open.

Young and male, the man had once been handsome, with dark hair, a well-developed body and the kind of easy good looks genetics and youth granted a lucky few. Now, though, half of his head was gone, his brains spilling out over what was left of his face while blood drenched everything. His left leg was gone from just above the knee on down and looked as though it had been gnawed off, while torn-up bloody-red organs and broken white rib bones laced with tendrils of torn flesh and muscle were exposed inside his chest by deep, razor-edge slashes that looked as though they'd been created by claws.

The dead man had been so completely mutilated and abused in life and death that it was hard to be sure whether or not his body had ever been completely intact, but Xenia's practiced eye and intuition told her that he'd been a perfect physical specimen before..._that_ had happened to him. The question wasn't what had happened to him, though, but _what_ had happened to him. It was a simpler question than it sounded, because no human being was physically capable of doing what had occurred to the man to another, no matter how savage or psychotic for one simple reason: the claw cuts were parallel, all three of them, they'd been caused at the same time...

Xenia had seen the worst humanity had to offer in every dark corner of the world in over a decade in the Mercenary trade, but even she had trouble keeping her eyes on the mangled mess that had once been a human being. She had to swallow hard to keep an acid taste from crawling up her throat, a feeling of illness she hadn't suffered since completing her training with the Spetsnaz after she'd been made a full KGB Agent threatening to tear through her self-control. She kept herself under control with a considerable effort of will, but it was harder than she would have liked.

Anna's dark skin made it hard to tell anything about her reaction beyond her expression, but she looked capable of mass Murder if the look in her eyes was anything to go by. The problem was, Xenia knew that Anna was capable of that any time, the woman wasn't completely sane at very best. Beyond that, though...all Xenia could tell from what she could see was that Anna was disgusted at what she was seeing.

Matt looked as though he was literally going green for a long second, then he simple went so pale Xenia was almost tempted to check his pulse to make sure his heart hadn't stopped in shock. That, however, was the kind of response she would have expected from most normal people, even professional Special Forces soldiers, at a sight like the one in front of them.

Anna's reaction was almost disturbing, though, especially given what amounted to a lack of it. Only someone truly demented or so soaked in blood, guts and killing that they no longer knew the difference between right and wrong and had burned out any Conscience that they once had would simply _fail_ to react to such a sight. Crazy she might well be, but surely Anna wasn't _that_ out of her mind...?

"Does anyone else think that we might be dealing with one of those Mutants we were just discussing, here?" asked Matt, his voice so quiet both women could barely hear him. Anna just shook her head because, Xenia was sure, she'd realised the truth too.

"Mutation doesn't create something like this, Matt, Genetic Engineering spliced with Mutant DNA does. Have you ever read the CIA Black Dossier concerning what Umbrella had loose in Racoon when everything went to Hell?" asked Xenia. Matt just sighed, putting his hand over his eyes.

"I don't want to know, do I? No, but I'm sure _you_ have" he replied. Anna just smirked.

"They managed to identify only two creatures which could do damage like this. One was called a Licker, twelve-foot tongue inside a head which is half teeth, eighteen inch claws three to each of its four feet, probably your weight Matt, but three, four times as strong. No skin and looks like it's been flayed and then released from Hell. The tongue can punch through an inch of steel, before you ask" said Xenia, before pausing to draw in a deep breath.

"Second one is a seven foot humanoid which can get even taller, with muscle and bone to match, tends towards one hand normal the other claws like the Licker. The most obvious marker is that the Tyrants heart is on the outside. No skin again, but soaks up damage like a tank and the only confirmed report of one being taken out I've ever heard of involved it being shot point-blank with an experimental laser cannon just outside Racoon City. Do I really need to point out now that if either of those is after us Suicide with a smile is our best option?" asked Xenia, her cool tone of voice letting them both know she was deadly serious.

"Hell, no... So what do we do if we see one of these things down here? Run like Hell? Beg for mercy? Pray? Or, my personal favourite, fight to the death?" asked Matt.

"Are you deaf? Death isn't final any more. Anything with the Virus in it wounds you? You get up and start acting like deaths an inconvenience even though your brains so far gone you don't even know you were once human at all? First thing you'll do is kill everyone close to you, then you'll go after everyone who trusts you close to them... Should I draw you a diagram, Matt?" asked Anna, sharply.

"No you should not, because if we go down against one of those things I intend to be in half-eaten pieces on the floor before it finally manages to kill me. If the two of you are planning on anything less you are _both_ out of touch with reality" said Xenia, before Matt could reply.

"Matt, check the other door" said Anna abruptly, as she turned away from Xenia, clearly a dismissal. It didn't bother Xenia, she knew she'd struck a nerve with the actually very private woman, despite her granite exterior and seeming solid rock constitution, both physical and mental. Few people ever guessed at the fact, let alone realised it, but Xenia _knew_ that Anna's shell was built up to the level it was because of something terrible which had happened when she was very young, maybe more than one "something".

If you got past her hide enough to wound her with words, either you were very close to her-like Matt obviously was, no matter what he seemed to believe-or you understood her like few did, like Xenia did. In reality, Xenia was sure Anna would _never_ talk about what had happened to her and how she'd ended up the way she was, but she could live with that. She knew an honest, if terribly damaged, individual when she saw one. She knew that if Anna gave her word, it was set in stone and the promise _would_ be honoured. That simple fact made Anna close to unique amongst every professional soldier Xenia had ever met...

Matt had to muscle the second door open, it turned out that the hinges were stiff even though the door was electronically controlled and the power was evidently off, but when he did it turned out there was a very simple reason: the room was an empty storeroom, lined with dust. Nothing had been in the room for weeks, maybe months from what he could see-nor had any_one_, given the total lack of disturbance in the dust.

"It's clear, where next?" he asked, turning back to Xenia. She was staring straight at the empty corridor ahead of her with a strange intensity, her head cocked, as though she'd seen, heard or otherwise somehow sensed something that she couldn't quite identify...

"The next step on the road to Hell, Matt. Where else?" replied Anna.

_**22.41.10**_

Y

It had taken them roughly ten minutes to reach the outskirts of the site of the explosion at a jog, but they would have had to stop at the edge of the big crater the blast had clearly created even if they'd been sprinting. It was twenty metres wide and ten deep and, more importantly, the original blast appeared to have vaporised the edge of a small mountain, in the process exposing the remnants of a steel-lined access corridor which was shattered and slagged so much that it was impassable.

The area of mountain around it was now made up of pulverised stone, shattered fragments of rock and what looked like a distinctly unsafe new cavern. It seemed to be issuing spurts of dust and the odd grinding crack of unsteady, settling stone every time he looked at a new section. The whole area was coated in rock dust and the heat of the blast that had created it still radiated outwards from the blast area. Going into it or anywhere near it seemed like a good plan if you were Suicidal or Suicidally desperate, neither of which Walker was.

However, that didn't mean that he was at all keen to let Leon Kennedy, who was there to collect what data he could on anything left of Umbrella's work in the structure, into the remains of the structure or anywhere near it. If he'd been alone it would have been easy enough to arrange an "accident" for Kennedy, even one involving bullets. But with two SOC soldiers standing literally right next to him? Short of getting into a provoked punch-up with the young man and breaking his neck in "self-defence", he would be seconds behind Kennedy's dead body in hitting the ground at best.

Maybe he should just let the already destroyed facility do the job for him? He knew that Umbrella was so paranoid that every Self-Destruct system was built with multiple redundancies just in case the system somehow failed to operate properly first time round. Even though it clearly hadn't finished the job first time around, the system _would_ default and get the job done with enough time to work...

"Alright, our objective is penetration of the enemy complex and analysis of any and all Intel available, but it looks to me like this isn't a team job. So you three stay here and secure my egress. I'll go in by myself and work fast" said Kennedy, then he stepped forwards and half-skidded, half stepped down into the crater before cautiously making his way over to the ruined entrance corridor. He had to stop and kick part of the former corridor wall out of the way so he could step inside, before he somehow managed to activate the manual override for the door, muscle it open due to the lack of power and disappear.

Well, that solved one problem, more than likely, Walker thought. Now he just had to wonder whether or not Matt was alive and, if so, where he was? Of course, he could make doubly sure that Leon was dead with a "nerves" burst of gunfire if the man somehow made it back out of the structure regardless, come to think of it…

_**20:10:02**_

Y

The lights in the corridor were very weak, providing just enough illumination to see by, being further fouled by what appeared to be traces of smoke, suggesting another fire nearby. What worried Xenia wasn't the possibility of another fire, though, that they could deal with. What worried her was the odd chemical scent she could just make out on the edge of the stink of smoke. Given the kind of place that she suspected this _was_...

They were faced with three doors ahead of them, making up the entire end of the corridor. The one directly ahead of them was so distorted and damaged it would clearly be impossible to open, so they ignored it. The one to the left was still secured, evidently operating off of a backup generator for some reason, on top of which it had no keypad to open it with, so they ignored it to. That left them with the loose door on the right.

"I'll lead, stay close" said Xenia, weapon raised and ready as she reached forwards and pressed the door shut gently but firmly-before wrenching it open and settling into a close-quarter stance as she faced the opening. When she saw what was inside, though, she'd have sold her right arm with a smile to not have had a good look at what was inside the room.

Bodies, at least a dozen-as far as she could tell. All of the remains, which was the only word which fitted, were scattered around the room, severed legs, arms, heads and even battered torsos lying all over in a literal pool of blood that had splattered everywhere in the room, walls, ceiling and floor. There was so much blood that it almost obscured the details of torn up and mutilated internal organs, shattered bones, shredded bodies and the remains of peoples faces as they lay dead and destroyed on the floor and against the walls.

A severed head had somehow ended up lying on one side facing the door, rent neck evident and still spilling a trickle of blood, the remnants of a severed spinal column sticking out of the base of the neck to secure the head in place on the floor. The pool of blood on the floor was so deep that it was making one eyelid tremble constantly, as though the decapitated head was trying to wink at her. The head of a young woman, who couldn't have been more than twenty-five.

So many body parts, bits and pieces of people, were floating around in the room that she doubted anyone short of a Surgeon could have even possibly matched all of the parts back together effectively and accurately. Given what she was seeing, even George Romero didn't understand just how far people would go to make sure even the possibility of loved ones or associates coming back to kill everyone they knew and loved once supposedly dead couldn't happen.

She knew now, because if what she was seeing wasn't the result of at least two grenades followed by heavy gunfire to make sure everyone in the room was dead, the door having been forced closed to magnify the effect of the blasts inside the room first, then she knew nothing about the effect of explosives on the human body. Whoever had done this had been very, _very_ certain about being sure the people in the room had been _truly_ dead. Just _what_ had happened in this place to cause this sort of atrocity to be committed by what had to have been another human being _before_ the Self-Destruct had been activated?

Matt took one look through the door, even with the poor lighting, turned, made it three running paces and promptly threw up. Xenia was less than impressed, but then he was still young and clearly still hadn't fought in any real wars yet, nor seen just how unpleasant human beings could _really_ get with one another.

It was hard to believe sometimes, even for her, but she'd seen worse than this-and that had supposedly been where atrocity was not common. In Afghanistan the natives and every fool who'd tried to conquer or control them since 1979 had learnt the hard way that there were so many fates far worse than death, if you wanted to try and find out by making the wrong people mad with you. That number, of course, included her-not that what she'd ultimately suffered had been so bad in '89. She'd escaped with her pride intact, at the very least...

"Yuck. Someone was very unhappy" said Anna, sticking her head in through the open door and taking a good, slow look around. Xenia was tempted to grab and shake the woman to see if there was enough humanity left in her to be horrified by anything any more, but she didn't dare. She was starting to wonder, though, whether the US Army was actually aware that they were employing someone who increasingly appeared to be, at best, a borderline Sociopath.

"Hysterical, Anna, I'll start laughing precisely one second after I die down here. Really. In the meantime, this is pointless, there's no way through here and we can't open the electronic door or force the other with something solid wedged like that. We need something else and I still haven't seen any fire extinguishers that would let us go that way. I'm fielding any and all suggestions here?" asked Xenia.

"Maybe if we could find some fire retardant blankets or soak layers of clothes before trying to run out?" suggested Matt. He didn't look like he expected his suggestion to be taken seriously, so his expression was a picture when she nodded her agreement.

"I hate to say it, but that might just be one of our best options" she said, slowly...

_**19:12:00**_

"Hold on...did anyone else hear that?" asked Anna, raising her head sharply. Xenia suddenly froze, well aware that the sharp-eared Anna, as the only one who hadn't been speaking, could have picked up on something she and Matt might have missed. Matt was so still when she glanced around that he might as well have stopped breathing.

Then she _did_ hear it. An unsteady screech of metal being torn, a rattle of noise coming from what could only be the throat and mouth of a living being, a slowly, unsteady rasping that probably passed for breathing with whatever..._it_ was. One thing she could tell for certain from the noise, just to begin with, was that nothing human had ever made sounds like that.

"Oh, _shit_. What the Hell's loose down here?" muttered Matt.

"I think your already looking in the right direction, Matt..." replied Anna, looking around quickly in all directions, her voice as low as possible as she clearly tried to tell where the noise was coming from. She started backing away from the three doors ahead of them even as she did, though, Xenia noticed.

The noise was echoing but was also getting louder fast, as though whatever was coming had caught their scent and was accelerating straight towards them. Xenia realised where it was coming from abruptly and turned to look at the already-damaged door as a shower of sparks from one wall flew up in the air not far enough down the passage beyond to give her much hope. She started to back away from the three doors as well, Matt doing the same but staying ahead of the two women, hairspray and lighter raised and ready.

"Should we run?" asked Anna, gently. Xenia didn't need to look at the other woman to know what she'd see in her eyes.

"Where?" Xenia replied, pointedly. There was nothing else to be said.

The noise suddenly developed into a steady crashing and cracking noise as the thing coming for them broke into a sprint. She caught a moments glimpse of something long, pink and skinless charging them, then a creature twice the size of the largest dog she'd ever see tore the wrecked door right off of it's hinges as it leapt at them with a speed and force which suggested it had been catapulted from the back of a high-speed train...

Y

The maintenance tunnels that led down to the reactor control room as fast as possible from outside the control room were barely tall enough for her to jog along at a fast crouch. Whether or not she was doing this for her own benefit and on Wesker's Orders, she swore someone important was going to die for landing her in this mess. The Plan had been perfect, the execution flawless, with just one problem-yet again, Umbrella had upgraded its security measures and this time? They'd outdone themselves.

A Suicide switch in the Database area which had made it impossible for her and her team to access the computer core after the initial release had wiped out the IT staff. Security staff issued such threats about site security and the control of information they'd fought to the death or committed Suicide to avoid being captured and interrogated, no matter what their position in the hierarchy. A self-destruct device which had activated so quickly that even Umbrella staff who'd started running the moment the countdown started would unlikely have made it out in time unless they were Olympic-class sprinters?

Things had to have gone spectacularly to Hell at Umbrella since the Racoon City disaster of '98, which had nearly destroyed the company and still could, she suspected, for them to have reached the point of effectively building Suicide Switches into their facilities just in case. Sometimes she even found herself wondering if there was ultimately someone in charge of Umbrella any more, decisions which appeared contradictory and even impossible to carry out having come down from on high in recent years that she knew of with her limited-to-say-the-least access.

She almost hoped that Umbrella _would_ self-destruct and get it over with, though, in reality. She'd barely survived Racoon City herself, but she'd been in the city since before the worst had begun as John Howe's "girlfriend", part of her Undercover Op- and she wasn't exaggerating when she said that she'd seen things human eyes weren't meant to see. The very worst that even Umbrella had to offer set loose on the civilians of Racoon City, monsters that even the minds of madmen should never have been allowed to conceive of.

Then there had been the one bright light in the city that had almost made it all worthwhile after she'd lost touch with Giselle. Rookie Cop Leon Kennedy, who in a matter of hours had almost succeeded in cutting through the considerable emotional armour she'd built up around herself and imprinted himself on her heart just by being who he was. It was, again, no exaggeration to state that she'd been falling heavily for the man, but the ice cold terror of her near-death experience after she'd fallen from the high walkway and been forced to make her own way out seriously injured and almost crippled had done wonders to sober her up.

Giselle and she lived and worked in the same world, they understood the world as it _really_ was and could find the kind of comfort in one another that only two lonely Souls forever trapped out in the night alone and otherwise forgotten ever could. If she'd given in to temptation and let Leon in under her guard as far as she'd let Giselle in? She'd have destroyed him, inside and out, in less than a year.

Her world was a mass of politics, lies, distortions and possibilities that she was often required to neutralise or "adjust" just to stay alive herself, where failure was not an option and cold-blooded Murder was often a necessity. Who she was, her entire identity, _what_ she was, she'd spun so much distortion and deception around all of it, all around her and every part of her life, that even _she_ sometimes had trouble keeping track-and sometimes wondered if she was.

She hadn't even used her real name since she was twelve and had come home to find her parents slaughtered like cattle in their apartment home. A lifetime of lies, killing and a failure to respect the fact that, just because they were masters of the craft, it didn't mean nobody could touch them, let alone kill them, had caught up with them in the end. She'd disappeared that same day and never been seen by anyone she knew or who knew her at the time since. The only person left alive who knew who she really was was Giselle, who never used _that_ name at Ada's request. Her parents hadn't been old when they died, so there was little question whoever had killed them would still be looking for their child...

Leon was far from either simple or stupid, but he just wasn't built to cope with the kind of life she had, the world she lived in. To be with her, honestly, he'd have to have followed her in because she couldn't just leave hers for his. Not alive, anyway. But she had just too much human decency left to her concerning people she genuinely cared about-for now, anyway-to let that happen. So she'd let him believe her dead, which was for the best as far as they were _both_ concerned.

Racoon City had also taught her something she never would have learnt otherwise, though, a lesson which had served her well ever since and gone a long way to making her more formidable than she ever had been before, despite everything. Intelligence Agents liked to say that they imagined the impossible on a daily basis, planned half a dozen "what if" contingency plans and had seen so much that nothing surprised them any more. For her, that was _literally_ the truth now.

After you saw the dead get up and walk around attacking and eating the living? Saw mutant monsters literally swallow human beings whole before regurgitating the bare bones seconds later? Watched eight-foot humanoid killing machines which looked like something H P Lovecraft would have had nightmares about tear right through brick walls as though they were made of paper while shrugging off half a dozen shotgun blasts at point-blank range? You discovered that the ability to be surprised or shocked had simply ceased to be a part of your consciousness.

That was why, when she finally reached the reactor room and found the containment door open, she didn't miss a stride. It was also why, when she picked out the four Zombies in the room, she just made sure her weapon was loaded and the safety off. She did stop, though, when she got a good look at the Zombies, took in the fact that their flesh was visibly turning almost to liquid and starting to come away from the bone in places, as though the rate of decomposition had somehow been massively accelerated for these Zombies. Huge patches of skin were peeling away, flesh had dried out and was peeling away from the bone, nails were flaking off, already milky eyes were heavily bloodshot to the point the creatures likely actually were blind. Hair was falling out in clumps...

She knew all of the signs, but it had never occurred to her that the result would be the same regardless of whether the body in question was alive or dead. The Zombies were suffering from Radiation Sickness, a massive dose for even dead bodies to be decaying so soon after death. That could only mean _one_ thing.

She got as close to the small door and the thick glass porthole as she dared, to get a good look at the reactor itself, a huge green steel effort wired and piped into systems all over the small room. A crack which _really_ shouldn't have been there was evidently visible in the reactors outer shell...

She didn't know how long she'd have at the kind of exposure levels evident in the room, she wasn't enough of a Scientist to even make an educated guess, but she guessed that seconds rather than minutes was most likely. If, that was, she hadn't already irradiated herself by coming into the underground corridor with the reactor room secure door open?

Didn't matter, she'd made a promise and she _kept_ her promises when made honestly, especially when made to people she cared about as much as she had about her grandfather when he'd been alive. Then there was what she'd been forced to witness at Racoon City, in violation of that very explicit promise.

_Never. Again. Not ever again._

Oh, this was really going to hurt. Even if she somehow survived it...

/End of Part Seven. All Reviews welcomed/.


	8. Chapter 8

For all disclaimers: see earlier Chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Eight

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

_**18:52:09**_

As the Licker came through the wrecked door so hard and fast it wouldn't have stopped even if it had hit a wall on the other side, all three of the soldiers waiting for it reacted differently. They also reacted very quickly.

Most people, men or women, when faced with a flesh-coloured impossible monstrosity that resembled a Lizard crossed with a giant feral dog crossed with a Sabre tooth Tiger, would have been shocked into both utter silence and stillness for the second that the Licker would have needed to tear them to pieces with its massive claws. One sweep of its massive claws would have torn flesh and shattered bone, gutted its targets and left nothing but cooling meat on the floor, at least to its primitive brain. That was why, in fact, the Licker was so deadly-one never fought a creature like this twice, so never had a chance to grow accustomed to the sheer shock of seeing such a creature.

The three soldiers facing it, though, were Veterans who'd seen nightmares in the waking world for years, spilled so much blood and ended so many lives that the physical sight of even a creature like the Licker was more annoying than frightening, let alone shocking. Even as the Licker went for them, they were moving.

Xenia dropped flat and rolled under the Licker as it jumped, easily dodging its claws before coming to her feet directly behind it with a spinning kick that shot her upright so fast it was as though she'd stepped around the Licker rather than ducked it. Without hesitation, still moving in one long, graceful dance of physical skill, she leapt onto the Lickers back and rammed her knife into its throat as deep as she could. She wrenched left to right deeply across its whole throat with such force that she nearly dislocated her right shoulder as her muscles contorted with the strain. Even as grey-green blood tinged with red spilled all over her hands, she just hoped it had arteries to cut.

Anna deflected the Lickers claws slashes with blurring parries from her clubs, moving so fast that Matt couldn't properly follow her movements. Wood chips scattered through the air as claws nicked wood, but then the Licker suddenly reminded them where it had gotten its name and _fired_ a thick red tongue that looked like it could drill through concrete at them both.

Without blinking, Anna caught the tongue between crossed clubs and, with a sharp and savage twist of the wrists, redirected it into the roof. The Lickers tongue cut at least a foot into the roof before stopping, but before it _did_ stop Anna had thrown herself past the tongue at the Licker itself. Her clubs connected with all the force her long, powerful body could provide, directly opposite one another and angled slightly up, against the Lickers misshapen skull. Both clubs actually shattered the force of impact was so great, but Matt could see the effect the attack had had. Bloody, deep dents were easily visible where Anna had struck the Licker and, if he was right, fragments of shattered skull were in amongst the slick of torn flesh and monster blood.

Matt couldn't use his own weapon for fear of striking both women at such close quarters, but he had to do _something_. He considered running in and simply kicking the Licker in the head, but Anna beat him to it with a double-fisted uppercut that connected so solidly the Licker was actually staggered, its head snapping backwards. She landed a two-footed kick using herself as a missile on its right front leg as it staggered and a wet crack announced her success as it almost fell, but before she could jump clear it let out a hiss of pain that grew into a roar of fury and reared like a maddened horse.

It body-slammed Anna with such force her entire body hit the roof hard enough to imprint her back in the metal before she slammed back down to the ground and rolled away over and over like a spinning top, her entire body flailing around in a way that told Matt she'd been unconscious before she hit the ground. Small pools of blood marked her passage and he had no doubt that her head wound had reopened, although a glimpse of blood around her nose and mouth made him realise that the sheer force of the impact had possibly made her bite deeply into her own tongue or lips.

Xenia ignored the brief fight and rammed the knife into the already gaping wound in the Lickers throat so hard that the entire weapon disappeared into the wound. She'd never know what she hit, but whatever it was it was clearly important because the Licker went berserk.

The Licker leapt straight up into the air so suddenly all Xenia could do was take the impact as she hit the roof, so hard that she was astonished she didn't hear ribs snapping as she was flattened between steel, bone and meat, the air blasted from her lungs so abruptly she saw stars and darkness for long seconds. The Licker fell back to the ground and writhed so madly that Xenia's whole body was contorted in ways nature had never intended even as she didn't dare let go, her back on fire as every muscle in her body screamed at her. She couldn't get a solid grip on the Lickers slick hide, though, so it was only a matter of time until it threw her off...

The Licker suddenly screamed so loudly and shrilly almost in her ear that she was left effectively deaf, for the long moment before it finally managed to throw her off and into a wall-which she collided with face-first with no time to react. A hideous crack and a terrible shock of pain made her think her neck had broken, before she slumped to the floor and found herself trying to breathe blood, her entire body feeling like a rubber band. Her nose was broken, not her neck, not that the fact did her much good under the circumstances...

Matt was left with only one choice to do something, no matter how insane it seemed. He was _not_ going to die down here, especially not at the claws of a monstrosity like this. He had too much to live for, Melissa being just _one_ excellent reason he had to survive. Another was that, after this, he no longer had any doubts about just how much Umbrella owed to the world in pain, suffering and destruction. The corporation was going to pay if he had to see to it himself, one drop of blood at a time.

He charged the maddened Licker, dodging its tongue with the edge of speed only desperation granted you, rammed the silver letter-opener up to the hilt in its forehead with a shuddering crack that almost broke his wrist as he applied all the force he could to drive it through bone, then he twisted the hairspray canister just enough that gas started to escape before throwing the entire canister down the Lickers throat. He'd played a lot of football back in High School, so he had a good eye and an even better throwing arm. When he followed the hairspray canister with the lit lighter a second later, he was glad he'd always excelled at running track too. But first-

He lunged forwards and head butted the Licker with such force that he drove it right down into the floor, barely avoiding the letter opener in the process, and, head swimming in agony, followed through with a brutal kick to the ribs that finally succeeded in rolling the Licker onto its back, where it started flailing around even more wildly than before. He had no doubt that it would be up again in seconds, but it didn't matter.

"Go back to _**HELL!**_" he snarled, then span and sprinted away so fast it was as though he was eighteen all over again. Xenia and Anna were both professional soldiers, they'd understand his actions-

The thunderclap detonation in the confined space hit Matt with a blast wave which lifted him off of his feet from twenty foot away and catapulted him forwards in a way which suggested he'd been hit by a hammer wielded by God. His clothes started to catch fire even as he span through the air as the air superheated, bouncing off of the walls literally like an out-of-control missile. He might have screamed, he honestly wasn't sure things were so impossibly chaotic in those last seconds.

He span right over in mid air and, suddenly, his head cracked against the floor so hard that he was slammed full-length into the ground with such brute force he could feel every bone and joint in his body grind even as he continued to almost forced along the corridor by the blast wave. His head was compressed against the floor as though he was under a vice, just like the rest of his body and, as he was battered black and blue against every rough surface, the accumulation of physical abuse finally caught up with him as his eyesight shrank to needle point before fading away entirely with dangerous speed.

He wondered if he was dying. He wondered if what he thought mattered at all, given what had just happened. He last thought was that he hoped he lived, because he wasn't ready to die just yet...

_**15:12:57**_

Y

Leon Kennedy had come to a stop, almost a literal dead stop in fact, less than thirty yards into the complex. He'd been running at a flat-out sprint, seeing all of the damage and realising that the complex had already been hit made his decision easy, when he'd suddenly caught the stink of smoke. He'd tried to stop immediately, but his boots had skidded on the torn-up steel floor and he'd fallen to his back before rolling over and over again the direction he'd been running. He'd barely had time to take in the increasingly dense smoke even as he finally skidded to a stop, before he'd realised that the fire he was lying next to had set fire to his jacket arm...

He'd rolled frantically away from the fire and patted out the hints of flame on his sleeve, smothering it for good measure, before scrambling to his feet and taking a good look at the only way forwards. It was engulfed in a river of fire that left mo weak spots he could even possibly force his way through, a fire that was slowly spreading both deeper into and further out of the complex-or what was left of it-from what he could tell. _That_ was a problem.

Sprinkler systems clearly weren't working, had probably been knocked out by the initial blast that had uncovered this place. The damage to the structure itself wasn't helping, uncovered stone would heat up, crack and collapse in the heat while damaged steel would have lost a large part of its fire-retardant qualities and would quickly melt. The whole place was going to cave in if it didn't blow up in very short order if the rest of the place was in the same state as the corridor, which he had little doubt it was.

Worse again, the only light source he had was the dim sunshine getting past the edges of the door he'd forced open to gain access and firelight, which meant that he could barely see beyond a dull glow of illumination that looked as though it originated in Hell. He had very limited fire fighting gear available as part of his weapons and gear pack, but nothing close too what he'd need to punch a safe path through a blaze like the one he was confronted with.

No fire extinguisher, no source of water, no fire blankets or other equipment? He wasn't going any further into the facility short of a miracle or what amounted to a Suicide attempt if he felt like trying to _run_ through the fire regardless of risk. He was stuck...

He staggered as a strange sound echoed in a way that somehow affected the air pressure, almost reverberating inside his ears. Unable to hold his feet, he went down on one knee with a grimace of pain, only to spot the flames suddenly die down to almost nothing. The whistle of moving air grew louder and stronger, he felt blood start to run down from his ears, but his eyes were so wide as he realised what was happening that he only dimly registered anything else.

A massive shift in the air currents and therefore the pressure in the facility had just happened very suddenly. In such a confined space a great enough shift of air from one place to the other could kill by collapsing the lungs of anyone caught in it, or by scarring the throat and lungs so terribly that breathing without the aid of technological assistance was an impossibility. Or, which was what was happening here, it could draw in all of the air in the area in a very tight and small area before releasing it in a sudden and massive surge. The air released like that would, of course, be catapulted directly towards all of the exit points at great speed, along with anything it might have picked up along the way...

Leon's face went pale, even as he forced himself back to his feet, turned and drove himself into a hard run. Flash fire, the entire corridor would be swept by an inferno for seconds when the air came back, but even one second was all it would take for him to be boiled alive or seared to a crisp. He wondered if he'd make it in time...

_**14:33:06**_

Y

Ada Wong, after Racoon City, let alone after all of the other missions she'd gone on where she'd had to deal with Zombies, monsters, Mutants and even worse, was an old hand with fear and shock. Four Zombies were barely enough to get her attention, so she'd employed the tried and true methods and shot each of them between the eyes with flawless headshots. That, though, she could have handled in her sleep.

The _real_ problem was a Nuclear reactor running wild and unshielded with failing safeties she would only be able to shut down with the Manual Override. She didn't even know where the switch, if there was one, _was_, but if she had to use a computer program she could be in very serious trouble. She could hack her way around most security systems, but Umbrella's never failed to be top-notch and very difficult to bypass. She simply didn't have that kind of time in the here and now.

_**12:12:52**_

She hurried over to the damaged reactor, trying to stay as far away from the damaged section as she could, found a battered-looking control panel and immediately typed in the old Emergency Shutdown Code she'd been given for emergencies back when she'd worked for Umbrella. It was worth a try, but not at all to her surprise it didn't work. She gritted her teeth and accessed the main menu, then initiated Shutdown procedures. _That_ didn't work either, the system was damaged and a "Malfunction" warning came up when she initiated it. That made her hiss between her teeth with displeasure.

She used her knife to prise the control panel loose and started to look inside for any shorts or wirework which needed repair, all the while keeping one eye open for anything else helpful or dangerous. She'd find something and stop this, she would.

She had to.

/End of Part Eight. All Reviews welcomed/.


	9. Chapter 9

For all disclaimers: see earlier chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Nine

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

Warm, she was warm. Why was that?

"_Matt?_" she muttered, not even aware of what she was saying. Semi-conscious at best, she'd never know she was voicing what she wanted most to be true. Luckily, though, nobody was able to hear her.

She could still remember just how much he'd made her scream that night, all of the right ways, just how well they're bodies had fitted together, just what it had felt like to have his skin against hers, his lips on her breasts, his hands on her hips and-_other_ places. He'd kissed her and claimed every part of her with the kind of deep, desperate passion that most people would only ever have thought of on the last day of their lives, made her genuinely _feel_ for one of the very few times in her life...and she still wished she could have gone back for more later.

She could remember waking up in bed with him at five in the morning, feeling utterly drained in the most delicious way possible, every part of her body tingling, most of her still in close contact with most of him. She'd slept well for the first time in three months that night, since the mission in Bosnia that had become a slaughterhouse, a fact she'd _never_ shared with him. But then she'd gotten up, dressed and left without saying goodbye. They'd only just met again for the first time, in fact, six years later and, to her, he looked even more delicious now than he had then.

She'd used him to get what she wanted back then, yes. But now? If he'd let something happen between them, if _she_ would? She might just be tempted to let nature take its course...

She could still feel the delicious sense of heat his body had created when she'd woken up to find them wrapped so tightly around one another-

_Wait_. Something wasn't right, she wasn't _remembering_ the heat, she was feeling the heat _now_...

She opened her eyes-and nearly screamed for the second time in an hour. She was in the underground tunnel in Afghanistan, still, she remembered that as memory came crashing back into her mind-and the air was on _fire_...

She could feel her skin starting to burn, smell her hair cooking, tell that her clothes were seconds from catching alight and roasting her alive. She didn't even dare breathe in in case she swallowed airborne fire and scorched her lungs from the inside out. This was it, there was no way out, she was going to _die_...!

The fire suddenly disappeared, as quickly as it seemed to have appeared, leaving Anna wondering if someone had just fired on her with a flamethrower before the memory of the most recent events finally crashed back into her mind and she breathed in sharply, realising what had to have happened. She sat up fast, only to nearly fall over as her centre of gravity floated around the room before settling down. She had a Concussion, now, too. Wonderful.

Xenia was slowly levering herself to her feet not far away, rising _too_ slowly on hands and knees, letting Anna realise that the tough Russian had to have been badly hurt in the fight with the Licker. Xenia was clearly trying hard not to move her neck at all, and her entire body was trembling as though she was trying to lift some incredible weight with immense strain. That told Anna's sharp eyes the Russian woman had somehow driven herself so hard physically that she was borderline physically collapsing, unable to go on at all. It was a credit to the woman that, despite her evident injuries and massive physical exhaustion, she was getting back to her feet for more.

Matt, though? Anna looked around and saw him...crumpled up at the far end of the corridor back the way they'd come, so crumpled up that he looked like a broken puppet rather than a living human being. She could tell that he was breathing, though, steadily and regularly, so he'd live.

All she could find of the Licker was a dark smear on the floor and tiny pieces of half-cooked meat scattered around the small area of the doorways and corridor. Matt had to have used his hairspray can and lighter to blow up the Licker rather than cook it-and he'd done a damn good job of it. Not that she would have expected anything less, she was just more than slightly amazed that they'd all survived him doing it at such close quarters...

She leaned into the wall and carefully made her way to her knees, then her feet, occasionally having to stop to let brief sensations of vertigo-which she never suffered from when healthy-and motion sickness pass, even as her eyesight swam occasionally. Was her skull cracked? This wasn't the first time she'd suffered a Concussion, but she seemed to be suffering far more and worse from this than she had the other two times.

Was it even safe for her to try and get up to walk around under her own power with such a significant head injury? No, not really. But, then, she didn't have a choice did she?

Anna suddenly noticed the blood pouring down Xenia's face and onto the floor from her clearly broken nose and realised that there could well be more than simple physical exhaustion to Xenia's evident physical weakness. Was the older woman worried that her back or neck had been injured? It occurred to Anna, all of a sudden, that she might just have gotten off lightly in the fight with the Licker if Xenia had nearly been crippled and Matt had been knocked unconscious. That was _not_ a thought which appealed to her, with all of them still stuck in this underground chamber of horrors.

_**10:02:09**_

"_Ow_, that..._really_...hurt" muttered Xenia, shaking her head to clear it. Given the fact Anna could see a massive bruise already forming around Xenia's broken nose, which was still spilling blood onto a small pool on the floor, not to mention the fact that smaller cuts and bruises highlighted every area of exposed skin-just like her own, Anna knew, Matt's too-Anna didn't bother stating that she agreed since they were all intimate acquaintances of pain now. What was worse was that it still wasn't all over.

"Can you stand up?" she asked, as Xenia managed to get her knees under her and get into a kneeling position. Xenia paused a moment then, her legs trembling with the strain, nodded as she stood up shakily, even though she staggered as she stood before catching herself.

"I'm alright" said Xenia, weakly, her voice so weak she almost seemed to be whispering with the strain just standing up was placing on her battered body. "What about _you_?" she asked, slowly, managing to turn just enough to see Anna with what looked like real effort.

"I'm Concussed and bleeding, so I'm alright too. The Lickers gone, Matt blew it up, I think. We still need to get out of here, though, so we should see if he turned his brains to jelly trying or not" said Anna, forcing herself upright and away from the wall she'd been resting against carefully. She felt a sudden surge of nausea, but it passed and she stayed on her feet, forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other.

"That sounds like a good plan" replied Xenia, stepping forwards gingerly and unsteadily herself. She, though, visibly recovered as she walked forwards, even though she winced with every step, the shivering quickly disappearing from her movements and body. Not that it stopped the blood still running from her nose from turning her shirt into bloody swamp, but she ignored that. After all, for the minute at least she couldn't really do anything about it.

Anna discovered that while she could walk normally as long as she was careful, quick movements or sudden physical efforts were a serious problem. She had a bad feeling that she'd pass out if she tried to push to even just what she normally considered her limits.

_**09:42:57**_

Xenia reached Matt first, knelt down and shook him gently by the shoulder. "Matt, are you dead? If not, I'm going to slap you until either both cheeks bleed or you wake up, just so you know" she said. That said, she ran a caressing set of fingertips over his left cheek to his lips...

"...Jus a few more minutes Melissa...'L get up...SHIT..." replied Matt, as he almost literally spat the last word out when his eyes finally opened and he saw who was leaning over him. Then he managed to smile, slightly. "You're a sight for sore eyes sometimes, Xenia" he managed, speaking slowly and clearly as though he wasn't quite sure how too.

"Anyone else might think that's what's known as flirting, Matt. You can kiss me later, though, or do something else if you have that in mind, right now were a little busy just trying to survive" replied Xenia, with a look in her eyes Anna didn't see too often. Matt had actually managed to get under Xenia's skin, somehow, not a feat easily managed. In fact...was that the faintest hint of a blush she saw in Xenia's cheeks?

"Right. Okay. I _really_ wish you hadn't said that. But, you're right, we've got to get out of here. As for can I walk? I have no idea, hold on" said Matt, before managing to force his elbows under him and lift himself half off the ground. Anna had seen worse than the injuries on his back, but only her near-obsession with self-control, that made most think she was either crazy or truly twisted on the inside-which was a long, _long_ way from the truth-let her not show anything she was thinking when she took in his injuries. After all, Matt meant something to her, her hands and lips had been there once not so many years ago...

He leaned forwards, straightening up slowly, which let Xenia see his injuries too. She kept her reaction to herself too, but it was easier for her since she still barely knew him. All the same, considering just how ugly it all was...

Matt rolled left, got his feet under him and, with a gasp of pain, managed to stand up almost upright, despite evidently being in pain from his back. He reached back with one hand to gingerly check his back, winced and visibly held in a yelp, then made a point of holding his hands by his sides. He looked at Anna and Xenia-and evidently didn't like what he saw.

"Alright, give it to me straight. Just how badly torn up am I?" he asked, loudly.

"Not. You've been _burnt_, Matt, there are blisters all over your back, big ones...and some of them must have burst when you were thrown over the ground by that blast you set off. They're weeping what I _think_ is pus, the dark yellow badly infected kind. I'd say we should lance them all now to get the infection out before it sets in, but we'll just make it worse without sterile instruments and disinfectant. I'd try not to think about it because it's going to hurt like Hell when your pain receptors start working properly again" replied Xenia, shaking her head slowly.

"I see. Well, thanks for being honest, that just means we have to find a way out of here before I'm left a cripple on the floor you'll have to carry because I can't handle the pain anymore. Please tell me you have a plan?" asked Matt, hopefully.

_**08:50:32**_

"Actually, _yes_. That little stunt you pulled might have solved our problems for us, if it had the same vacuum effect on the whole complex where there's open passage. The way out was down that passage we couldn't pass because it was on fire, I'm sure. If were _very_ lucky all the air was pulled out of that passage in here for long enough to kill the fires there. If it was, we can get out. If it wasn't, we're dead. Can you make it?" asked Xenia.

"Just watch me" said Matt, turning and taking off at a decent run, despite staggering more than once, back the way they'd come. Xenia glanced at Anna, caught her eyes, shook her head and took off after him.

"Never mind me, I'll make it, Concussion and probable skull fracture notwithstanding..." muttered Anna, as she tried to force down another wave of nausea before taking off after the two of them at best speed. The most she could do was extend both arms and use them as braces to keep her upright while she forced her legs to cooperate and accelerate up to a staggering run.

Y

Ada Wong was no electrician, but she knew her way around computer consoles and that had taught her how to pick out and repair electrical connections. She didn't have the tools she needed here to do a proper job, especially given the already evident reactor core breach which was making her a lot more than simply nervous, but she didn't need everything working perfectly. She just needed everything to connect the way it was _supposed_ to, she could work with that.

She shocked one finger screwing the last of the damaged circuits back into place, but the control panel lit up, if dimly, when she was done. The small screen on the wall came to life as well as she succeeded in rerouting power to reactivate key systems. The screen was fuzzy and thick with static, but she just needed a few seconds if she was right.

_**ACCESS: Granted. Welcome, Researcher Philips.**_

_:System status?_

_**WARNING**__** System Interrupt **__**WARNING**_

_**CORE BREACH DETECTED. Safety Systems Protocols COMPROMISED, estimate 15 percent efficiency.**_

_**BREACH POINT ALERT. RADIATION LEAK CORE STRUCTURE CONFIRMED.**_

_**All staff EVACUATE. Initiate PROTOCOL: DEAD CELL.**_

_**Estimated time to total system failure:**_

_**07:49:49**_

_**LOCKDOWN INITIATED. Self-Destruct ACTIVATED.**_

_**WARNING**__** System Interrupt **__**WARNING**_

_**PATRIARCH program running. **_

_**Self-Destruct ABORT.**_

_**System RESET.**_

_:Initiate Manual Override Reactor Emergency Shutdown procedure._

_**CLEARANCE CODE REQUIRED.**_

_:******_

_**CLEARANCE CODE ACCEPTED.**_

_**Reactor Shutdown Manual Override ACTIVATED.**_

_**Initialise Shutdown timer?**_

_:IMMEDIATE initialise. Bypass Timer requirements._

_**Command ACCEPTED.**_

_**Reactor SHUT DOWN in progress.**_

_**WARNING**__** System Interrupt **__**WARNING**_

_**REACTOR Safety Protocol FAILURE.**_

_**System integrity nine percent.**_

_**ALL STAFF **__**EVACUATE**__**.**_

_**REACTOR CHAMBER SELF-SEALING IMMEDIATE.**_

Ada barely had time to blink at the words on the dimly lit computer screen before she heard the whir of hydraulics start up behind her. She span and leapt for the door as fast as she'd ever moved, but even so barely got both feet through before the door slammed shut with a deadly solid "thud" that sounded like the End of the World being announced in Hell with a single drumbeat.

She started to run, stopped, felt very weak suddenly, fell to her knees without even realising that she'd collapsed-then threw up. She thought she felt something tear in her throat, but it couldn't be helped. She threw up again, but fought back a thick wave of nausea that threatened to drop her and keep her down for good. Once she could see again, she dragged herself back to her feet and forced her legs to run.

She'd stopped the reactor from blowing up, saved lives in all likelihood-not that she'd have shed tears over that, since Umbrella would have killed them, not her-and kept her promise to her grandfather. _This_ time. She'd just have to find out if she'd killed herself in the process, but she was sure she'd be alright somehow.

Both "S", her real employers and Wesker, her supposed employer, had access to some truly unique medicines and treatments that she suspected could deal with even radiation poisoning. Wesker, at least, wanted her alive as his top "Spy", so she just had to get out alive and this _could_ be dealt with.

The only problem left was that she had to get back to the entry point her team had blasted into the facility and escape from the mountain area completely, all the way back to her Extraction point, before she was brought down by the poisons now floating throughout her body. She could do it, of course, because she had no _choice_. Dying was not an option here, or failure.

At least she had what Wesker had sent her for and would have time to make a copy. She'd send the real one to "S", as usual, while giving Wesker the copy. It would, of course, work just the same way as the original, even though it would actually be less effective than the original sample. The point was, though, he wouldn't turn her into a Test Subject to "punish" her for her "failure" and would keep her in his inner circle, where her mission demanded she be...

Y

Leon Kennedy had only finally survived the inferno that had washed over him when he hadn't been able to outrun it by throwing himself down as flat as possible on the ground and doing his best to protect any exposed skin from the fire. He'd felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck burn, know that he was next, this was it-then the fire had simply disappeared. Just like that.

He jumped back to his feet and found himself staring at a scene which made no sense. The entire corridor, while still blackened and warped in places from the fire and its heat, was simply dark and dead now, the lights long gone. The fire was just _gone_, as though God had snapped His fingers and looked at it a certain way...

"What the Hell is going on down here?" muttered Leon, so quietly that he could barely hear himself speak. If there were any Umbrella survivors down here, despite everything, he didn't want to tip them off as to his presence.

That was when he heard them, three sets of running footsteps approaching his position at speed, one oddly lagging but the other two so close they were almost on top of him. There was nothing to duck behind, nowhere to go, so he assumed a marksman's firing stance and readied himself.

Two tall figures came running towards him out of the darkness, both at least six feet tall, one a woman one a man. The gender didn't matter, this was Umbrella, _nobody_ could be trusted. No matter what they said or claimed. _That_ he'd learnt the hard way years ago now, which always brought to mind a beautiful young woman's face with slanted brown eyes, black hair and the flicker of red silk in the corner of his eye.

"Stand and be recognised!" he barked out in his drill instructors voice. That warning was basic enough for any idiot to understand, no matter how mad or shut away in their own little world Umbrella Scientists sometimes got. It was also the _only_ warning they'd get, another lesson he'd learnt the hard way.

One of the two figures, the man, started to slow suddenly, but the woman just overtook him and even appeared to accelerate. That did it, he wasn't letting anyone within arms reach in here.

"You were warned" he said, then he drew a direct line of sight on the centre of the charging woman's chest. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger-even as the man suddenly shouted, with a strong American accent.

"DON'T SHOOT-!"

_**06:40:29**_

/End of Part Nine. All Reviews welcomed/.


	10. Chapter 10

For all disclaimers: see earlier chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Ten

/January 4th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

_**05:59:50**_

Xenia's ears were still ringing from her proximity to the blast that had obliterated the Licker and her head wasn't as clear as it should have been because of the battering her mind and body had taken on their way through the Umbrella facility, but she would later still say that she should have seen it coming. Seen _him_ coming.

The smoke and physical pain combined distracted her enough to make her miss Leon Kennedy's abrupt appearance ahead of her, but she'd never miss a gun being fired at her no matter where she was or what she was doing. The bright flash of close-range gunfire added to the whip-crack roar of gunfire came almost together she and Kennedy were so close together, giving her no time to think at all. But Xenia was a Veteran of a thousand battlefields and countless situations which involved a chance of life or death depending on what you did in the instant before that. She didn't need to think about it.

Without thought or hesitation she shifted her direction and ran straight into a wall with such force she rattled her teeth, even with her arms up and braced to cushion the impact. The bullet slashed through the meat of her left side, ricocheted off of a rib in a flash of agony that almost put her on her knees and spun away. She felt blood explode from the wound even as flesh tore and her left leg was instantly drenched, but she stayed upright.

If she'd been armed, Kennedy would have died for that. People who wounded her didn't get to survive doing it. But, as it happened, Kennedy would later prove to be a special case for more reasons than once.

"HOLD YOUR FIRE! HOLD YOUR FIRE! WE ARE AMERICAN SOLDIERS!" roared Matt, his voice booming so loudly in the sudden silence following the gunshot that the sheer volume actually made Xenia wince. His "parade-ground" voice, she assumed.

"Prove it, _soldier_. Name and number" snapped back Kennedy, his voice cold as ice in winter. He, Xenia couldn't help but think, had been taught to take no prisoners _and_ no chances. That would do a great deal to help keep them alive now, she couldn't help but think.

"Matthew Ryan, Field Commander SOC Team One and Unit. If you don't know the designation I can't explain it to you" said Matt.

"Xenia Omerova, Military Adviser for the US Mission in Afghanistan. Special Forces" said Xenia, biting down on her limp to silence a groan of pain. She was going to be in bed for a week with just what she'd suffered so far today, she couldn't help but think-and that was _after_ the Medics got done with her back.

"Anna Neagley, CO of Delta Force Fire Base Echo Company. I have to apologise for not giving you more detail, but I'm bleeding to death and in something of a hurry. Who are _you_, anyway?" snapped Anna, her voice suddenly so full of Command that Matt almost found himself snapping to attention as she spoke.

"Leon Kennedy, Special Agent. All I can tell you is that I receive my Orders direct from POTUS. No time for more. Tell me what happened here" said Kennedy.

"The base blew up and we all died because an idiot Secret Service Agent wouldn't run for his life and help others do the same when he still had time. You _do_ understand that we know for a fact there's a Self-Destruct device counting down in here as we speak, don't you?" Xenia snarled.

_**05:10:39**_

"If it didn't go off and do this, what happened here? Why should I believe you?" replied Kennedy.

"To be honest, SS boy, I couldn't care less whether you believe that were all going to die or not. It's like this: were all wounded, bloody and battered. We've just fought our way through Hell and nearly been killed by a creature which looked like it had escaped from an H P Lovecraft novel. This is after nearly drowning, twice, before which we were nearly smeared into the landscape of Afghanistan forever by a flying wall and an underwater river. To sum up, on top of having a severe Concussion I am well and truly _pissed off_. Unless you want me to take all of that out on _you_, Kennedy, you will stop asking fucking stupid questions and get out of the _way_. _**NOW**_!" Anna exploded, levelling a thousand-yard stare at Kennedy that would have moved a tank crew backwards inside their vehicle.

_**04:29:33**_

"...Okay, but you all fill me in later. Lets _go_!" snapped Kennedy, suddenly realising that he did, indeed, believe what he was being told, mad as it sounded.

Xenia, limping but upright, needed no further invitation as Kennedy stepped out of the way and ran outside as best she could, trying to slow down the bleeding with a hand clasped over the wound as best she could until she could deal with it properly. Matt turned around as he heard a thump of impact and saw Anna on one knee, clearly having trouble standing up. That was when he noticed all of the blood covering her back-and that she was coughing up blood that was falling in bloody strings from her lips.

"Jesus Christ in _pink_-! Anna, why didn't you say you were hurt this bad?!" Matt asked, running over to help her up.

_**04:01:09**_

"I'm _not_ hurt that bad, I bit into my tongue when we were fighting the Licker and it won't stop bleeding. Unless I want to choke on it, I need to stop and spit it out occasionally" replied Anna, before pausing to wipe her mouth clean with the back of her hand.

"Well, there's that and the fact I can't seem to walk in a straight line under my own power..." she muttered, so quietly he could barely hear her. Knowing her the way he did, he knew that he _wouldn't_ have heard her speak unless she wanted him to. Which meant...

Before she could react, he stepped in, put one arm under her shoulders and another behind her knees then lifted Anna off of her feet. The expression on her face was half-surprised, half-pleased. "You got the idea then..." she whispered into his ear before resting her head against his chest. He turned to carry her out as fast as he could-and all of the lights went out.

_**03:40:41**_

"Bloody _Hellfire_! What's next, a rain of frogs?! KENNEDY! Some HELP HERE?!" Matt shouted out into the sudden total, dead darkness.

A pen-size flashlight snapped on, waved around for a second, focused on Matt's face and then went down to his feet, showing him the ground beneath his feet. He could work with that.

"Best I can do. Head straight for my voice, I'm standing in front of the exit" Kennedy called out, even as Matt followed the small pool of light as quickly as he could. He hardly seemed to have moved at all before he felt a hand grab his shoulder as Kennedy went behind him and stood close, shining the light ahead of them both.

_**02:50:59**_

"Follow the light and run for your life! _GO_!" snapped Kennedy, as the seriousness of the situation evidently finally sank in. Matt didn't bother answering, he just jogged as fast as his tired body could safely manage with Anna supported in his arms.

When he caught a glimpse of the approaching daylight and thought he'd glimpsed Heaven even as he put on speed. They'd make it yet-!

"Matt! Pass her through!" shouted Xenia, who was waiting outside the breach in the entrance passage Kennedy had entered through.

"I am _not_ a piece of luggage-HEY!" shouted Anna, even as Matt passed her through the gap headfirst without slowing down. Xenia staggered away with Anna in her arms, wounded side slowing her down, but it didn't stop Matt going through the gap head-first the moment there was space. Kennedy was so close behind him that Matt came close to accidentally kicking the other man in the face as they got outside within seconds of each other.

"Walker! Get down here and _help_ us-!" shouted Kennedy at three figures above them.

With a start, Matt looked up and recognised his two teammates from Team One-and the tall man who could only be his boss. Had Kennedy dragged them along or had they come looking for him? More to the point, why did he think that was remotely important right now?

_**02:10:42**_

Mark and Paul immediately ran down towards the struggling Xenia to help her while Walker headed straight for Matt and Kennedy. It seemed an odd choice to make to Matt, he and Kennedy were the two of the four most capable of getting out alive under their own power.

"Matt, what the Hell's going on here?!" shouted Walker, his voice sounding tinny through his closed helmet visor. Not that the body armour would do him any good if the Self-Destruct went off with them still inside its blast radius.

"BOMB! No time to explain! Run like Hell!" Matt shouted back, even as he took his own advice and headed up out of the crater at a turn of speed that would have impressed an Olympic Champion, Kennedy right alongside. Walker stopped asking questions, turned and ran himself.

_**01:42:02**_

Mark and Paul supported Xenia's injured side and managed to add enough of their muscle to her that she actually got up to a decent speed as she came up out of the crater at a steady, if slow, run. When the four of them got to the top, the near-exhausted Matt took Anna in his arms again and headed back to camp with the no intention of stopping until he was safe inside the camp again, even if meant he woke up in a hospital bed.

With Mark still supporting the wounded Xenia, nobody needed any reminders. They all turned and ran.

_**00:59:01**_

Xenia's couldn't help noticing that she was having increasing trouble breathing-and there was no way her physical fitness was to blame even under these conditions. It seemed that the wound in her side had done more damage than she'd realised. She wondered just how bad it was...

_**00:33:00**_

If it had been anyone but Matt carrying her, Anna would have found a way to wrestle free and run on on her own two feet. With Matt, though, she was enjoying listening to his strong and steady, if racing, heartbeat under her ear as he ran with her in his arms. She was no romantic, but there was something about the situation that she could appreciate in that sense. Matt's strong arms around her made her feel...well, _comfortable_, in a way very, very few could.

_**00:15:09**_

Walker couldn't believe the situation he'd found himself in. He'd had a flawless plan to take out Kennedy, no questions asked, all ready to go-and then who else but Matt Ryan, his own number two in Afghanistan, had come out of the hole in the ground he'd been watching like a Bat out of Hell.

If there was one person he couldn't stage an "accident" in front of, it was Matt. He knew the younger soldier already had his suspicions, he had to avoid giving the man any more ammunition one way or another. At least, not until his position was more secure.

_**00:03:09**_

By Xenia's count, they were out of time. She ducked flat-just in time, as suddenly the whole mountain seemed to explode all over again...

/End of Part Ten. All Reviews welcomed/.


	11. Chapter 11

For all disclaimers: see earlier Chapters.

**Faith**

Chapter Eleven

/January 5th 2001, northern Afghanistan/

A whole day had passed since they'd escaped the blast, although maybe "survived" the final destruction of the facility would have been a better word to use. It hadn't done much to change the fact her whole body ached like she'd become one big bruise, nor had the constant throbbing from her gunshot wound gone away. The pain meds had made it tolerable, but that was it.

What Xenia Omerova hated more than any of those things, though, was the fact that she was still being forced to stay in her Infirmary bed by the camp Doctor, who had stitched up her side, dealt with her various other knocks, cuts and scrapes, then stood back and taken a good, long look at her. Following that, he'd advised her against getting out of bed for at least twelve hours and stated, for a fact, that he'd sedate her with a small hammer to the back of the head if that was what it took to keep her in bed.

Clearly, she'd realised, he knew her reputation for going on no matter what happened short of having internal organs hanging out of her belly tripping her up as she ran. Well...just maybe, after everything which had happened, she could actually use the rest this time?

Anna Neagley was in another bed further down the Infirmary room, a cold, white, sterile environment which had hard beds with just enough give in them to be comfortable. By far the worst hurt of the three of them, her head wound had been cleaned and padded because wounds to the head were impossible to properly stitch, only butterfly adhesive stitches had been used to seal the wound itself. Somehow they'd all escaped broken bones, but she'd heard the ageing camp Doctor mutter that Anna's skull being intact after what had happened to her brought new meaning to the expression "thick-headed".

Even the Doctor hadn't dared try to Order Anna to stay in bed, though. Her reputation as a savage in combat bled into her personal life in no small way and, Xenia had noticed with a smirk that she hadn't tried to conceal, the Nurses had been very careful to ask Anna's permission to touch her before they'd done anything else. Anna would have had the Doctors thumbs torn loose in her hands before he could scream if he'd tried to tell her to do something she didn't want to do-and he'd clearly known that.

In fact, seeing Anna, despite a severe Concussion, knock Leon Kennedy unconscious with one punch when he'd made the mistake of putting his hand on her arm to get her attention without asking first had been one of the few entertaining things she'd seen, experienced or witnessed over the last day. Thankfully, the young Agent had come to quickly enough to get her released by the Military Police before Anna had gotten angry enough to put the two officers in Hospital.

Now, Anna was sitting on her bed cross-legged with Matt Ryan, also confined to the tent for the next twelve hours, playing what looked like a game of Canasta. More to the point, given the grin on her face, the woman was winning-although Matt didn't seem to mind.

Easily reading the body language between them, Xenia could tell Anna would jump Matt in a short second if he so much as winked at her. Anna wanted Matt in a way which suggested sex in public places wouldn't have been out of the question if she got what she wanted-and the electricity crackling around the woman because of her physical proximity to Matt was obvious to anyone who looked.

Except to Matt, apparently, who seemed to be enjoying the card game far more than the look Anna was aiming at him, not to mention the curves and hard form almost straining at the t-shirt and leggings Anna was wearing. Nine out of every ten men Xenia had ever met would have fought a Lion with their bare hands and leapt over molten lava blindfolded for just the chance at a woman like her, but Matt couldn't have been more oblivious to the offer if he'd been dead, buried and dug up again.

Odd man, Xenia couldn't help but think, but then the odd one's were sometimes the one's most worth having. Whatever history was between the two of them obviously wouldn't hurt, either, but Matt seemed to have moved on where Anna evidently hadn't...

She had other matters to consider, though, far more important one's. Fatally important ones, in all likelihood.

She'd known about Umbrella Corporations work and "interests" since 1989, when she'd been with the KGB. Umbrella had often needed Test Subjects, humans, for their "work" and the Politburo had been only too willing to supply them, in return for adequate "Compensation" such as money in secret personal bank accounts and certain luxuries. It made the rich richer and allowed troublemakers to be "disappeared" forever in a way which no historian or investigator could or would ever solve, a win-win outcome for the Politburo members.

Reliable KGB Agents had been assigned to handle the details and keep things quiet, while disposable muscle in the form of Afghanistan Veterans hooked on Heroin or street trash thugs who would do anything for the right price had been employed to supply muscle. _She'd_ been marked as "Reliable" very early on and, in fact, had actually been an assistant on one such trip herself.

The screams, howls and other...sounds...coming from the prison trucks had made her think of her Grandfathers stories of Nazi Concentration Camps he had found with his Regiment in Poland during the Second World War. Human beings simply weren't designed, inside or out, to experience certain things and live with the memories afterwards as though there was no more to it than that.

She'd finished the job at the time, because _she'd_ have been made a Test Subject if she'd tried anything. Then she'd gone back to Moscow and Volunteered for the mission to Afghanistan, preferring the honest Hell of War to the damned and damning possibilities of Umbrella's labs.

She'd been raised as an Orthodox Roman Catholic by her parents, who had been very clear and careful about keeping the fact to herself when she'd been young, but she'd never really had any time for belief in anything greater than herself so had never even gone to a church. Despite that, the night she'd gotten back from her first "Transporter" Operation she'd gotten down on her knees in the mud and Prayed to God that there was a Hell for people capable of what she'd witnessed and those who would aid them. She hadn't asked for forgiveness for her own actions because freedom of will meant that you made your own choices, then you paid the price when either old age or something considerably less natural ended you.

It didn't change the fact that it hadn't been the last time she'd been on one of those Ops. It didn't change the fact that Umbrella was still around and undoubtedly still buying human "waste" from whoever had a "surplus" they didn't want. It didn't change the fact that she could have proved what had been going on for decades behind the scenes in 1991, after the KGB effectively disintegrated and she gained access to all sorts of information she wasn't supposed to know about, let alone possess.

She'd sat on the information for seven years as an Ace in the Hole in case she'd ever wanted something to hold over Umbrella Corporation-then Racoon City had first of all been infected by an apparently freak release of one of Umbrella's Virus experiments, before being nuked by the US Government to contain the threat. The very fact that such a thing could happen without Umbrella being taken apart piece by piece by a combination of both legal and military assault in the USA itself had nearly stopped her heart.

That was when she'd realised just how far Umbrella's reach _really_ stretched. The only thing which could have so much as slowed down a full-scale assault on the corporation, by everything the Superpower the USA still was could bring to bear, would have been an Executive Order from the White House itself. By back channels, no less, which normally meant either Politics were involved or a _sensitive_ matter had to be dealt with...carefully.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a sop to the hard-liners in Congress and the Senate who were Hell-bent on making sure they got their pound of flesh from Umbrella. The near-collapse of sales of Umbrella products had occurred because everyone had seen the news reports of Racoon City being nuked and it was common knowledge that the corporation effectively owned the city.

It didn't change the fact that the viewing public had short memories. Sales were already starting to creep back up, Xenia knew from business reports in newspapers. Despite the horror and atrocity that had occurred in the vaporised city, not even a nuke was enough to keep the attention for longer than a couple of years, it seemed.

Well, America _had_ nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in 1945 to end WWII. Maybe this meant that nuclear destruction was acceptable in the USA as long as it was for a good reason?

The evidence she had of what Umbrella was up to, had _been_ up to, she kept in a hidden place so secure that nobody would ever find it unless she led them to it on purpose. The blood of everyone who had died in Racoon City was on her hands as much as anyone else's. But she wasn't naïve, if she'd tried to go public with it even back in '91 she and her whole family would have disappeared as an example to others and nobody, at all, would have asked any questions nor gone looking for them, ever.

_Now_ she knew that Umbrella's scope of operations extended far beyond what she'd learnt after over a decade of investigation and intelligence gathering from sources scattered throughout the world in _every_ layer of business, industry, military and political circles. If they had facilities in Afghanistan? It was just as bad as she'd always feared, no one was safe...

Which led on to why she'd stayed a Mercenary for all these years, rather than accepting job offers from various potential employers who she would have loved to take. Being a true Mercenary meant having no loyalties but to yourself, having a past but no future, living pay cheque to pay cheque on hire for the highest bidder. You sold your skills and knowledge for the highest price you could get and forgot about things like loyalties and beliefs, because you _had_ to.

She wanted to live, so she'd do whatever she had to do to stay alive. If that meant shaking the Devil's hand and "forgetting" about "inconvenient" details, that was what she had to do. If it meant being worse than dead in some ways? While her heart still beat, she still had hope.

Besides which, just because she didn't dare go up against Umbrella Corporation by herself, despite everything she had on them, that by no means meant she'd given up on putting to rest the Demons and Ghosts of her past. She'd wipe off the blood on her hands Umbrella had put there before she died if she had to do it with the ash of a nuclear weapon herself, she'd have her revenge on those sick old men who'd destroyed her country so long ago now while she was at it.

She just hoped that Matt and Anna would never get pulled into the nightmare Umbrella represented, especially given that neither of them knew the world the way she did. Especially given one simple, irrefutable truth: death hadn't been the end since 1967, literally, she'd discovered that much back in '91.

God's help the brave men and women of the S.T.A.R.S. who had stumbled across the truth and dared to declare War on Umbrella Corporation when nobody else would, she couldn't help but think, yet again. No matter what they knew, no matter how far they were willing to go to get the job done, no matter what sacrifices they made and were willing to make, no matter what they _knew_?

She, better than anyone else, knew that they had only scratched the surface of the thick hide that concealed the Beast itself. If it ever set out to honestly kill them? Umbrella could destroy all of the S.T.A.R.S. in a week no matter where they hid, who helped them or what they did, that she knew for a simple fact.

Sometimes, she wondered if there would even still be a world left for people like Matt and Anna after the nightmare finally ended and all of the lies were finally exposed. In reality? She very much doubted there would be...

/End of Part Eleven. All Reviews welcomed/.

**The End?**


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